Blast From The Past: Lockinge Stakes

The big question before Frankel made his reappearance as a four-year-old was whether he would prove even better than he had been at three. It was some prospect given that he was already Timeform’s highest-rated horse since Brigadier Gerard in the early ‘seventies. Unbeaten in nine races by then, Frankel’s brilliant three-year-old season had included victories in the 2000 Guineas by the widest winning margin for sixty-five years and the Sussex Stakes by the widest margin for thirty-three.

No wonder that Frankel’s return to action in the 2012 Lockinge at Newbury, following an injury scare earlier in the year, was one of the most eagerly-anticipated Flat races of recent times. Only five rivals took him on, one of them his stable-companion and elder half-brother Bullet Train in the role of pacemaker. Although Excelebration had proven himself a top-class miler in his own right the season before, he’d been no match for Frankel on the three occasions they’d already met. The last of those had been in the Queen Elizabeth II Stakes at Ascot where Frankel had made him look ordinary four lengths back in second. Fourth at Ascot was another of Frankel’s Lockinge rivals Dubawi Gold, he too beaten three times by Frankel as a three-year-old, including when chasing him home six lengths back in the Guineas.

Whilst not as spectacular as that Guineas victory a year earlier, or the breathtaking eleven-length rout he was to inflict on Excelebration again next time out in the Queen Anne Stakes at Royal Ascot, Frankel’s win in the Lockinge set the tone for another unbeaten campaign.

As Racehorses put it, ‘the speculation [before Frankel’s races] was not about whether he was going to win, but by how far, and how impressively he was going to do so. The answer was usually: by a comfortable margin, like a chainsaw going through balsa wood.’

Starting at 7/2-on, odds made to look generous compared with his starting-prices in his subsequent races at four, Frankel ran out a five-length winner from Excelebration at Newbury, tracking his pacemaker until taking over two furlongs out. Excelebration might have finished a little nearer if starting his challenge from a closer position and the same went for Dubawi Gold who was another four lengths back in third, but neither would have had the slightest chance with Frankel however they had been ridden.

Four more wins after the Lockinge – the Queen Anne was followed by a second Sussex Stakes, and then the Juddmonte International and Champion Stakes when proving every bit as good at a mile and a quarter as he had been at a mile - took Frankel’s unbeaten career record to fourteen wins. A rating of 147 duly made him the highest-rated Flat horse in Timeform’s experience, supplanting the 145 achieved by the 1965 Derby and Arc winner Sea-Bird.

Exactly four years after his win at Newbury, Frankel is generating plenty of excitement again, this time as a stallion, and it’s appropriate that his first runner Cunco is due to make his debut at the same course twenty-four hours before this year's edition of the Lockinge.