TIME performance of the week away from group races came from Clever Cookie at York.

The seven-year-old gelding had got into a fast race when beating Tac De Boistron at Chester the time before and coped well with the less-testing ground here in posting an improved 122 timefigure.

There won’t be many better than him in the Ascot Gold Cup field and odds of 10/1 seem to underestimate him.

Again at listed level, Tropics broke the six-furlong course record at Windsor last Monday, an effort on fastish ground which equates to a timefigure of 116.

On the same card, Besharah did her Queen Mary Stakes claims no harm in landing a novice race at long odds-on. Her overall time was not especially fast, but she showed a rare turn of foot, as she had at Ascot on her debut, running the last two furlongs in an eye-watering 21.46s.

That is actually the fastest last-two-furlong sectional Timeform has recorded on turf in Britain so far this year (confirmation can be found in Timeform’s newly launched Sectional Archive), and Besharah is only a two-year-old. That’s no mean feat!