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After being placed in many of the states feature races, Lip Reader finally broke through for a deserved feature race win in the $40,000 Group 3 Hardings Hotmix Devonport Pacing Cup on Saturday night.
Starting from a 30m handicap, the gelded son of Sportswriter settled at the tail of the field in the 3020m event before gaining a cart up three-wide over the final 1100m before dropping into the one-one near the 500m.
Reinsman Conor Crook peeled the pacer three-wide rounding the home turn to run down the race favourite, stablemate and fellow 30m backmarker Ryley Major 1 1/2m, with Resurgent Storm a further 6.8m away third.
“He has been knocking on the door now for about a year to win one of these good ones, he has always been running placings, but tonight was his night,” said Crook post-race.
“He is probably a bit hard done by with the new rating system, in the old he still would have been an M0, which would have put him off the front, but as he has won discretionary after discretionary, he cops 30m which has probably handicapped him out of most races where he has done a good job to run a place.
“But he got the right trip tonight, and I didn’t have to do much once I lobbed on Ryley Major’s back. You just have to follow him as long as you can,” added the winning driver.
The win continued a golden run in the race for the Hillier family, with Rohan now training the past two winners, while Troy Hillier trained and drove Illegal Immigrant to victory in the race in 2020.
While the Devonport Pacing Cup win was the night’s highlight for Conor Crook, he had plenty of success on the 10-race card, including two of the support features.
He prepared Kuyomi to victory in the Jeremy Rockliff MP Coastal Pacing Thousand with Rohan Hillier in the sulky, while Crook drove the Ben Yole trained With Revenge to score in the Ladbrokes Mares Incentive.
The other highlight on the card was the Tasfreight Dash For Cash which Kadar took out for trainer Todd Rattray and driver Liam Older, with the Roll With Joe entire recording a slick 1m 58.9s for the 1930m trip.
