Wonderful as their achievements have been, Bill and Anne Anderson’s Lauriston Bloodstock are currently racing in rarefied air. 

Despite repeated messaging that Lauriston’s best horse, Ladies In Red, will not target Grand Circuit events in coming months, most pacing zealots would rate her as Victoria’s pre-eminent pacer. 

Amazingly, however, her most menacing threat in such features – should she choose to switch course – would likely be another Lauriston commodity, also trained by Emma Stewart. 

His name, of course, is Honolua Bay. 

Saturday night at Melton, Honolua Bay faced a litmus test of sorts. 

Sure, he’d won his previous seven starts prior to the TAB Minuteman Free For All, and sure most of those wins were at feature level, and yes, he’d already broken the Kilmore short-course record first-up from a break. 

Nevertheless, this was different; primarily due to one new adversary, Lochinvar Art. 

Now, nobody is suggesting that the Lochinvar Art we witnessed on Saturday evening was in any way representative of the champion ‘Arty’ all Harness followers know and love. 

For starters, the Goulburn Valley legend was found to be suffering a low-grade respiratory infection after his Minuteman flop. 

Regardless of this, however, Honolua Bay still proved an almighty point. 

For the sixth time in his last seven wins at Melton’s 2240m trip, Emma Stewart’s wildly glamorous son of Art Major recorded a mile rate of 1min54secs or faster.

As a context for this achievement here are some numbers recorded by some of our highest profile Victoria Cup winners over the past decade or so.

In 2011 Smoken Up went 1:53.4, in 2017 Lennytheshark went 1:53.2, in 2018 Tiger Tara went 1:53.4 and last year, around the slightly faster Bendigo circuit, Max Delight went 1:53.2. 

In other words, Honolua Bay has won six of his last seven Tabcorp Park events in Grand Circuit-worthy times. 

On one hand, it’s exceptionally vexing that Ladies in Red and Honolua Bay seem so unlikely to meet given the obvious promotional benefits of such an epic clash. 

On the other hand, if you were Bill and Anne Anderson, legendary breeders with the best male and finest female pacers in the state, dividing and conquering is very smart business. 

PAT Driscoll, principal at Yabby Dam Farms, set himself an awesome ambition when entering the trots as an owner and breeder roughly a decade ago. 

That ambition was to revolutionise the sport. 

And based on Friday night’s action at Tabcorp Park Melton, Driscoll is well on track to achieving his goal. 

In total, Yabby Dam Farms bred four of the nine winners on the elite-level all-trotting card. 

Half of those successes were at Group 1 level. 

On a week where breeding takes centre stage on SEN-Track and their patented programme, Trots Life, no one stands taller than Driscoll right now. 

The opinions expressed in The Forum are those of the author and may not be attributed to or represent policies of Harness Racing Victoria, which is the state authority and owner of thetrots.com.au.