SATURDAY at Ascot was all about Vautour. Beforehand the talk focused on the excitement at his return, afterwards the talk was of how impressed or unimpressed you were.

Balanced against his tendency to jump to his left, and – in the context of the King George – the fact that Kempton is a tighter right-handed track than Ascot, is the fact that he put up a high-class performance, the magnitude of which may have been under-played. It was his seasonal debut, he hadn’t done much, he hadn’t even been away, yet he beat a race-fit Ptit Zig by a length and three quarters in a really good time.