Electrical Carlita vulnerable

OZONE PARK, N.Y. - Early indications suggest horseplayers will have their work cut out for them when handicapping Aqueduct's inner-track races. Wednesday's card drew 90 horses, and a total of 93 runners - an average of more than 10 per race - filled the entry box for Thursday's program.

The exception to the lineup of big fields is Thursday's featured eighth race, a six-furlong $54,000 allowance sprint with optional claiming conditions that lured just six fillies. All of them are 4-year-olds except for Fashion Girl, a $500,000 3-year-old who won three of her first four starts as a juvenile, but who has been blanked from five starts this year.

An analysis of the projected early pace begins and ends with Electrical Carlita, a speedball who has had the lead at the first call in each of her last 11 starts. None of the others has been any closer than fourth at the first call of their three most recent races.

, the lone member of the field entered for the optional claiming price of $85,000, has three wins and two runner-up finishes from seven career starts on this winterized strip. Those inner-track totals include a wire-to-wire score in the mud against entry-level allowance types last January, and since then Electrical Carlita has won four more times, including her second-, third-, and fourth-level allowance conditions.

The catch may be that those four victories all came at Delaware Park, where she went 4 for 6 this year. Indeed, Electrical Carlita is stepping up in class, after failing to hold a clear lead in a $50,000 claiming sprint two weeks ago, into a spot where four of her rivals - Cupid Season, Distinctive Kitten, Hidden Ransom, and Lavender Lass - are dropping from stakes company.

Lavender Lass and Cupid Season ran their best Beyer Speed Figures of the year finishing second and fourth in the ungraded Carson Hollow Stakes on the inner track back in February. Each is in receipt of a major rider switch - Lavender Lass to Rafael Bejarano, the nation's winningest rider this year, and Cupid Season to John Velazquez, the front-runner for this year's Eclipse Award.

, who won her last inner-track start back in March, has chased Sugar Punch (unbeaten in six starts this year) in her last three starts, all New York-bred stakes.

Hidden Ransom has run in eight straight stakes since a win in the slop at Gulfstream in January, and turns back to her best distance after finishing last in the Grade 2 First Flight.