Customer Base stretches out in Possibly Perfect
ARCADIA, Calif. – After 21 races, Customer Base will try something new in Thursday’s $75,000 Possibly Perfect Handicap at Santa Anita – racing at 1 1/2 miles on turf.
The race should be an ideal fit for the 5-year-old Customer Base, who has won two stakes – the Lucie Manet Stakes over 1 1/4 miles on turf at Hollywood Park last July and the Grade 3 Robert Frankel Stakes over 1 1/8 miles on turf here last December.
The Possibly Perfect Handicap is the third race on an eight-race program. Thursday is the first of four days of racing in the final week of the track’s first-ever spring-summer meeting. Los Alamitos begins its summer Thoroughbred meeting July 3.
Customer Base won the Frankel Stakes days after the start of the track’s winter-spring meeting. This year, she has struggled, finishing ninth in the Grade 2 Buena Vista Stakes over a mile, a troubled eighth in the Grade 3 Santa Barbara Handicap in April, and sixth in the Grade 1 Gamely Stakes on May 26.
The Buena Vista was perhaps too short for her. Customer Base was in traffic in the Santa Barbara. She may have been overmatched in the Gamely over 1 1/8 miles on turf.
The loss in the Santa Barbara was a stinger for trainer Tom Proctor and his assistant, Aimee Dollase, who noted that Customer Base had to take up in the stretch.
“She might have hit the board,” Dollase said.
Dollase described the Gamely Stakes as a “tough race” for Customer Base. “This will be better for her,” she said of Thursday’s race.
Customer Base is part of a field of seven in the Possibly Perfect Handicap. Only Phonybooksnrecords, fifth in the Santa Barbara, has raced over the distance, finishing seventh in an allowance race at Keeneland last October. Phonybooksnrecords, who will be ridden by Corey Nakatani, might be part of the pace along with Changethechannel, who was third in the Santa Barbara and ninth in the Gamely Stakes.
DRF FORMULATOR FACT: No. 3 Changethechannel. Trainer/jockey combo of Sean McCarthy and Tyler Baze is 3 for 8 with a $7.57 ROI in turf routes over the past five years. Click for more details. – Mike Hogan
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“She’s the pace of the race, and we’re not going to change that,” trainer Sean McCarthy said of Changethechannel. “The farther, the better. She has a nice, steady pace and a good rhythm. I like the mile and a half.”
Aside from Customer Base, the field has two other stakes winners in Charlie Em, who won the Grade 3 Senorita Stakes at Hollywood Park in May 2013, and Plaza de Indias, a Group 1 stakes winner in Chile in 2011.