ALL-WEATHER flat racing is meanwhile ticking over quite nicely, with regular Friday evening meetings at Dundalk and a smattering of good races and promising performances in Britain.

Pillar Mountain was quite a promising winner at the Co Louth track last week despite having to come from stall 14 on what was his debut. He can surely improve on his 71 time performance here in due course.

The outside stall also did no favours to Above Us Only Sky in the previous race, in which the Charles O’Brien-trained filly caught the eye with a 34.4s final three furlongs.

She would have been in front shortly after the line and can finally make amends when returned to seven/eight furlongs.

The best flat timefigure in the period under review came in a listed race at Kempton at the end of November, when Red Verdon finished well to deny the doubly penalised Master The World, the first two running 104 and 107 figures respectively.

That Kempton card opened with a particularly interesting two-year-old maiden, in which the Charlie Appleby-trained Ispolini got the better of the John Gosden-trained Glencadam Master.

The Kempton time looks particularly fast, so much so that Timeform has taken the view that the inner loop, on which this was the only race, was much quicker than the outer loop on the home bend.

That may be so, but I would prefer to take a positive view of the race itself, and so have Ispolini running a 93 timefigure, which is in line with what might be expected of him from the sectionals he recorded on his very promising debut at Nottingham. This could be a race which produces plenty of winners.

Encouraging sectionals are not always about horses running quickly at the end of a race: going too fast early can identify a horse as being interesting for the future also.

A couple of recent all-weather horses which fall into that category are Gakku at Southwell on November 28th and Corked at Chelmsford on December 1st.

The former did far too much too soon and ended up being beaten at odds-on in a maiden he might have been expected to win with ease, while the latter still managed to finish second in a handicap despite being sent for home prematurely and treading water by the end.