The Times
22 September 2025
Excellence is good, competition essential. The £600,000 Yorkshire Oaks had the first but, with just four runners and English and Irish Oaks winner Minnie Hauk duly coming home as easily as an odds-on favourite should, it had little of the latter.
Thank heaven for the Cheveley Park team who elected to run their talented grey four year old Estrange despite her preference for going much easier than yesterday’s which produced a winning time of 2minutes 26.67, two seconds quicker than the next race over the same distance. For without Estrange the race would have become something of a mockery of such a valuable and illustrious event.
As it was we did at least have a few seconds of jeopardy as Ryan Moore drove Minnie Hauk up to take over from her pacemaker Garden Of Eden and Paul Mulrennan and Estrange loomed outside seeming going even better. But Minnie Hauk is a filly who needs a bit of stoking to hit top speed and Estrange’s stride looked awkward as she tried to match her rival whilst conceding the 9lbs to the younger filly. At the post she was three and a quarter lengths adrift with Garden Of Eden the same distance away third and Oisin Queen collecting a cool £32k for hacking in a distant fourth.
Minnie Hauk is a powerful filly who clearly doesn’t do any more than she is asked which means that even better could be still to come. Despite needing a supplementary entry she is favourite in many books for the Arc but other targets could prove more suitable, something confirmed by Aidan O’Brien who was winning this Yorkshire Oaks for a record 9th time.
“It’s up to the lads,” he said of the now fairly well aged Tabor, Smith, Magnier trio. “Ryan said possibly the Arc for Whirl and the Breeders’ Cup for this filly depending on ground. Whirl, as we saw at Goodwood, handles soft ground, but she handles the other ground as well. Minnie Hauk has run on soft ground, but we always thought the quicker the ground the better she’d be, and she skipped over that. She has a lot of options, but the better the race the better she’ll be.”
Half an hour after the Yorkshire Oaks there was plenty of competition in the Sir Henry Cecil Galtres Stakes and for one set of owners a bit too much of it. For two of the 10 fillies ran in the royal colours but despite the welcomed presence of Queen Camilla who had helicoptered down from Balmoral, the joint favourite Rainbow’s Edge could only finish 6th and Aeolian finished a tailed off last. Aeolian is a big filly who had won last time on only her second outing. But she is a big unit and after leading into the straight she looked uncomfortable on the fast ground and dropped right out to finish a distant last.
It was an unlucky case of “run and regret” but the Yorkshire Oaks was worth six times the Galtres Stakes value and if more owners are not prepared to take a chance, the regret will imperil the game itself.