Frustration for Wincanton with another meeting lost due to dry spell

Clerk of the course Tom Ryall could not hide his frustration after Wincanton was forced to abandon a third consecutive meeting due to the firm ground and a lack of rainfall.

The Somerset circuit lost its popular Badger Beer Chase day earlier this month, following an earlier meeting that was transferred to Market Rasen, and now stumps have had to be drawn on the fixture on November 19.

Ryall said: “It’s massively frustrating. We’ve had dry summers before, but we’ve never seen it this dry in the autumn.

“Two or three weeks ago we had 89 millimetres of rain in a week and that got us into a firm, good to firm position, but since we abandoned Badger Beer day two weeks ago on Tuesday we’ve actually only seen 8mm of rain, so it’s not really moved a lot since our last abandonment.

“We do have rain forecast for next week. Certainly Sunday afternoon, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday look like potentially very wet days so it’s slightly helpful, but what the forecast has been doing recently is showing rain and then it disappears the closer you get to it, which is even more frustrating. So we’ll see where we are on Monday.

“We do have our reservoir, but it only refills from natural rainfall. We emptied it in April and it sat empty until probably August and it started refilling slowly when we started getting some rain, but that is sat at about 60 per cent capacity which equates to about six or seven days of 10mm of irrigation circuits around the track.

“But we wouldn’t actually use that until we were in touching distance of becoming raceable. There’s no point in using it if there isn’t a realistic hope of the fixture being on and that water alone will not make it raceable, so we need the rain to go with it.”

He went on: “We actually had a pretty good year up to the start of this season. We lost one right at the start of January for frost, but we raced all the way through January and February when other tracks were abandoning for waterlogging.

“It’s frustrating that we started the year so well, but it’s out of our hands until it does start to rain.”