From good to soft to standing water: Plumpton passes inspection after heavy rain

Racing at Plumpton on Sunday afternoon goes ahead after the track passed an unexpected inspection, with watering taking place on Saturday and the official description reading good to soft at 6.30am this morning.

The going is now soft but there were areas of standing water on the course after significantly more rainfall arrived than forecast, forcing officials to call an inspection at 11.30am.

Clerk of the course Marcus Waters said: "When I walked it this morning we'd had 7mm overnight and since then we've had 17mm," he said. "Last night I was expecting 2-3mm and today 4-5mm, highs of 11mm, and we've got well over double that."

There have already been 24 non-runners at the track – 21 due to the ground – and Waters defended his decision to water the course yesterday after it missed several showers during the week, with both the sun and wind impacting conditions. 

"We definitely would have had good to firm in places at the very least if we hadn't have watered and received the rain," he said. "We had three really windy days on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday and then yesterday even when we were watering it was really sunny. 

"I left the course thinking 'I hope we get rain here' otherwise we might end up good to firm in places. It was really drying out quickly. The forecast pretty much changed every day as I've been looking at it and we've missed a lot of the showers but this time we've hit a big band."

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