Wetherby offer hope

Officials at Wetherby have offered renewed hope that Saturday's meeting will beat the freeze.

The track has been badly affected by the recent cold snap but with milder temperatures sweeping parts of the country every effort will be made to put racing on.

"It's not changed a great deal from this morning, it's soft, good to soft in places," reported Jonjo Sanderson. "We've got a couple of areas where's still a bit of frost in the ground.

"We had temperatures around six degrees at their best today. The forecast is for minus one or minus two tonight and plus three tomorrow day.

"There's a chance we might get another minus three or four tomorrow night, so we are still very much in the lap of the gods.

"If it all stays positive tonight, tomorrow and Friday night there's a very strong chance we'll be racing on Saturday.

"I just want to see what happens tonight. If it's minus three or four tonight it might put us back to square one and that would be the end of it. If not we're with a fighting chance."

Meanwhile, Ayr's recently added meeting on Saturday looks all set to go ahead after the course was reported to be raceable.

"It's all thawed out and we were raceable today," said clerk of the course Katherine Self. "It's soft, heavy in places but I would imagine it would ride a bit slower than that given the amount of frost we've had in it.

"We may get a slight air frost tonight of plus one. We were plus eight today, it will be similar tomorrow and plus nine forecast on Saturday.

"Now the track has fully thawed out we've got a good two days ahead of the racing now with no frost in the ground.

"The ground might be fairly testing but we've got a covering of grass and will be racing on fresh ground so I don't expect any problems."

Conditions will also be assessed again on Friday at Carlisle where officials are cautiously optimistic of racing on Sunday.

"We're soft but still partly frozen," said clerk of the course Andrew Tulloch.

"We should get no worse than plus one tonight, up to plus four tomorrow and five or six on Saturday with some rain coming in the evening. We are mildly hopeful.

"We'll have another look in the morning and take it from there. We might need to have to a look on Saturday to make sure we are going in the right direction, but it's fingers crossed."