Wednesday tips: Dave Nevison's best bets at Haydock

Toby Lawes won a decent race at Newbury’s big meeting last weekend and has his string in decent form. He looks to have found an ideal race for La Higuera to break his maiden here.

This gelding has stamina-laden relatives on the dam side of his pedigree and unsurprisingly showed his best form over three miles last time.

That was his first run for six months and cheekpieces were applied, presumably to sharpen the six-year-old up a little, and it certainly seemed to work well.

He has had three weeks to get over that reappearance and would normally be expected to come on for that run, his first in a handicap. La Higuera is off the same mark and off bottom weight in this race. 

Benjamin Macey, who rode a winner for the yard last week, claims 3lb against other conditionals this afternoon and I expect the concession to show in his favour at the end of this event.

This ex-French gelding has not set the world alight since he moved to Micky Hammond, failing to make the frame in any of his starts, but there has been some promise on occasions, especially on his recent run at Wetherby where he was only beaten six and a half lengths into fifth place.

He has been dropped 12lb since he arrived at the Hammond yard and it looks as though he could now be ready to make an impact in handicaps over here.

The yard has sent out three winners in the last week and have clearly hit form once more.

Rian Corcoran has already used his 10lb claim to winning advantage on Japailetemps and has a very good chance of completing the hat-trick here.

This is definitely the toughest race Japailetemps has contested on this country and he is 7lb higher than his latest win, but such is the impression he has made, it is a good bet that he is still well-handicapped off a mark of just 107.

The trip today is ideal for him and he was running well in higher grade races than this when in France, so I definitely feel David Pipe has plenty to up his sleeve to play with in the weeks ahead.