Champions Day seen as an ‘obvious’ target for Docklands

Queen Anne winner Docklands will have an Ascot return on his agenda as he looks set to spend the remainder of the season on British soil.

Harry Eustace’s five-year-old is owned by the Australian outfit OTI Racing, and was campaigned internationally over the winter before returning to Newmarket.

His early campaign revolved around Ascot, a track he clearly favours and shone at again with a tough Group One victory over Rosallion.

The Queen Elizabeth II Stakes is therefore the late-season target over the same course and distance, with a European campaign the likely focus in the meantime.

“The obvious thing to do would be to work backwards from Champions Day at Ascot, there’s also the Prix Jacques le Marois and the Sussex Stakes,” said Eustace.

“He takes his racing well, he ran 10 days before Ascot at Epsom so I don’t necessarily want or need to space his racing out a lot.

“He put in a huge performance at Ascot, but he’s a five-year-old and if there was ever a year where we can campaign him more aggressively then this is it.

“We were waiting to see how Ascot panned out before we began plotting where’d he go next, but the one thing we know he won’t do is go to Australia.”

Eustace had two Group One winners across Royal Ascot, the second being Time For Sandals after her 25-1 strike in the Commonwealth Cup.

She has a host of top level sprints on her radar, though connections anticipate next year will be a busier campaign as she started her season this time relatively early.

“She’s great and seems to have come out of it really well,” he said of the filly.

“We hadn’t really thought past Ascot with her because we were pitching her in a Group One and we knew it’d tell us how to campaign her for the rest of season.

“Now she’s a Group One winner, she’s got to run in Group One races so races like the Flying Five, the Nunthorpe and the Haydock Sprint Cup are all obvious targets.

“She was up and running early enough for the Fred Darling so I don’t think we’ll be campaigning her aggressively this year.

“We’ll very much look at the older sprint programme next year, it sort of writes itself.”