Testa Rossa may be at home in the Hunter in a physical sense, but he still maintains a luminous presence in Victoria with runner’s in every Stakes race at Caulfield tomorrow including Redangelo (H.D.F McNeil), Testascana (Heatherlie Handicap) and Panipique/Testa My Patiance together in the Slickpix Stakes and Red Colossus in the Memsie Stakes.
Acclaimed stallion Testa Rossa is well placed, even this far out, to emulate if not better successive fourth placings on the national sires roster (by number of individual winners) in preceding seasons after a monumentally successful weekend which saw two new stakeswinners and the continued emergence of crack mares There’s Only One and Sienna Red.
Testa Rossa’s first new stakeswinner came in Sydney when last season’s joint top rated 2YO Filly, Pane In The Glass, made a sweeping run to win the Group 3 Silver Shadow Stakes (1300m) kicking off her Princess Series assault in ominous fashion.
She has now won four times in 8 starts with earnings of more than $600,000 helped along by placings in the AJC Sires’ Produce Stakes and Champagne Stakes as the shades came down on the autumn.
Trainer John Thompson has his eyes fixed on the Group 1 Flight Stakes before a likely tilt at the MRC One Thousand Guineas, a race which she was installed as favourite from the opening market.
Later that evening in Macau, one of Testa Rossa’s Asian representatives, World Fortune, made up for a luckless second in the Group 1 Star of the Sand last start to win the Group 3 Summer Sand Challenge.
World Fortune, a Macau Derby runner-up, was bred by Colin McAlpine’s Eureka Stud and sold for $50,000 at the 2008 Inglis Melbourne Premier Yearling sale and has since won M$2.8 million.
Inglis’ Victorian director Peter Heagney knows Testa Rossa as well as anyone, given that the former six times Group 1 winner kicked off his career at Romsey before relocating to Scone.
”We were devastated when we lost him out of Victoria,” Heagney recalled,”thankfully he remained in Australia which was important but we would have liked to have had him here in out own State and fought very hard to retain him.
”To be honest, I think Testa Rossa has been an under-rated sire and maybe it’s only now that people are starting to appreciate how a good a stallion he really is.
”(His yearlings) are always sound sellers, there is always interest in them and you can always sell them,” he added.