Officials at Warwick are “cautiously optimistic” Saturday’s high-profile card will go ahead, as the freezing weather continues to disrupt the fixture list and threatens to derail top-level racing at the weekend.
Racing in Britain was wiped out completely on Monday amid icy conditions, with only the two all-weather fixtures at Southwell and Wolverhampton going ahead on Tuesday.
But clerk of the course Nessie Chanter is hopeful of staging the William Hill Classic Chase card after the 2025 meeting was lost due to similarly adverse weather.
“I keep pressing the refresh button on the weather forecast, which is changing all the time,” said Chanter on Tuesday afternoon. “Funnily enough, I think it is getting a bit better.
“Tonight appears to be the last sub-zero night, temperatures are going to rise from tomorrow onwards.
“We are due a fair bit of rain on Thursday night so as long as that doesn’t turn to snow, that’s only going to help us.
“Temperatures are getting up to 4C or 5C during the day so we are cautiously optimistic, but we are going to need a favourable forecast and a stroke of luck at the same time.
“If we didn’t have that rain forecast I’d be pessimistic, if it does come as rain it should speed up the thawing process.
“If there are areas we can cover on Friday we will, but at the moment it looks like we will be above freezing until Saturday. I hope it goes ahead, we lost it last year and we have such good entries that we are just hoping and praying.”
The Coral Silviniaco Conti Chase is Kempton’s feature on Saturday, but it appears to be a race against time to see if the Grade Two contest will beat the freeze.
“It is frozen, well and truly,” said clerk of the course Barney Clifford.
“We’ve had three consecutive nights of -6C and temperatures of no higher than 2C for the last three days.
“So we need the forecast to improve enormously over the next four days. At the minute, we are unraceable and you can’t have any optimism if you are unraceable on Tuesday afternoon.
“If the forecast comes our way there is a chance of 50-50, but we will know more on Thursday afternoon going into Friday.
“If we were meant to be racing tomorrow, I would have abandoned it this afternoon. But we just have to give it time and see how the forecast plays out.”
Naas’s meeting, which was abandoned on Sunday, also needs conditions to improve ahead of Friday’s rescheduled card, which is due to feature Grade One action in the Ballymore Novice Hurdle.
“We are still unfit to race, we will look again the morning and see where we are, and update then,” said Naas clerk of the course Brendan Sheridan.
“The forecast looks more positive now than it did even yesterday, so we are hopeful, but we are still unfit to race at this present time.”
Catterick’s jumps meeting on Thursday was called off on Tuesday morning.
“It was -6C overnight. We’ve had progressive hard frost down to -6C with wind chill, but last night was just general -6C,” clerk of the course Fiona Needham said.
Huntingdon have called a 9am inspection on Wednesday morning ahead of Friday’s jumps card, while the meeting at Leicester on Wednesday had already been called off.