1,000 career wins for Queenslander Brendan

Successful Queensland harness racing driver Brendan Barnes, 27, recently topped the ton for the sixth consecutive season – and along the way landed his 1000th career winner.

“I sort of knew that both the achievements weren’t far apart. I got my 100th win for the season on the Saturday and then the big one not long after,” he said.

Brendan and his brother Hayden, 29, both followed in the footsteps of their father Al into harness racing in the Sunshine State.  Hayden, who has driven more than 500 winners, is currently taking a break from the sport to work in tunnel excavation on road projects.

“When I was growing up, I actually hated horses. But I wasn’t the greatest student at school and then I got the harness racing bug. Once I started driving at the trials, that was it,” Brendan said.

After starting driving in the 2012-13 season, he gradually attracted the attention of owners and trainers. From 119 drives in his debut season, Brendan has built his reputation and is now highly sought after with more than 1000 drives for each of the past two seasons.

In the past six seasons, he’s driven 110 wins, 122, 133, 153, 147 and 106 so far this season. He’s earnt over $7M in stakes and his CV shows plenty of success at the top level with one Group One win; two G2’s; six G3’s and three Listed victories.

“I’m really enjoying it at the moment because my partner Gemma (Hewitt) has between 12 and 15 horses in work at our Stockleigh base,” Brendan said.

“It’s a great set up.  Our track’s great – we recently worked on it as usual after copping about 100ml of rain,” he said.

“In addition, I do all the shoeing and breaking-in. It fluctuates a lot but there’s four or five youngsters here at the moment and that’s something I really enjoy.

“Gemma is great in that she gives me a lot of my own time. I’m busy enough with all the race driving each week, but I’m in a good routine. We’ve got a good team going at the moment which helps.

“Some weeks do get a bit repetitive, but all of us in the industry would get that feeling now and again. I guess it comes back to our love for the animal.”

by Terry Gange, for Harnesslink