SARNIA, ON — When the three-year-old trotting fillies parade onto the track at Hiawatha Horse Park for their $130,000 Gold Final on Thursday evening, Porsche Hall will be wearing the number nine saddle cloth for the second straight week.

“What are the odds of drawing the nine-hole two weeks in a row?” asks the filly’s owner Roy Maxwell. “They should be pretty long.”

In last Thursday’s elimination round Porsche Hall posted a second-place finish, overcoming her outside post with a brisk early move and a steady trip behind favourite Oaklea Odessa, but Maxwell knows a repeat performance will be tougher when the top nine fillies return to Sarnia this week.

“It would be nice if we get the kind of trip we got last week, but we’ll see what she can do,” he says. “She should be even better, she should be tighter, but of course it all depends on the trip.

“There are some nice fillies out there. Hopefully we’ll be able to be in there with them and get our share.”

Casco, MI resident Maxwell shares ownership on Porsche Hall with his partner in Bet Max Stable Inc., Bruce Tayler of Grosse Pointe, MI, and Benenati Inc. of Clinton Township, MI. A homebred out of Angus Hall and the group’s former Michigan Sires Stakes champion Bankers Jackpot, Porsche Hall learned her early lessons in Michigan and then moved into Sarnia resident Terry Kerr’s stable last August.

“I knew Terry by reputation,” explains Maxwell. “But actually, how I met Terry was at the Hiawatha casino. I live 20 minutes from the bridge and I used to go to the Hiawatha casino and Terry was there a couple of nights. One night I said to him, �We’ve got a horse here, would you be interested in taking a shot at her?’ and he said, �Sure, we could do that.'”

The partnership clicked and Porsche Hall won her first start under Kerr’s tutelage in a Grassroots division at Dresden Raceway last September. The pair went on to post three more victories in a five race freshman campaign, including wins in the Grassroots Semifinal and Final.

“We really have the best of both worlds,” says Maxwell. “Terry is a catch driver, so you’ve got a first class driver who trains some, as opposed to a trainer who drives his own horses. One guy drives 10 times a week and the other guy drives 30 times a week. I doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out which one will be the better driver.”

Heading into last week’s Gold Elimination Maxwell was fairly confident that Porsche Hall was ready for the leap up to the Gold Series, but her impressive effort — which saw her hit the opening quarter in :28.2 and then finish things off with a :29.4 last quarter — has him wishing they had been a little more generous in race selection last winter.

“She is eligible to the Casual Breeze, the Elegantimage and I think a couple of others, but we didn’t go whole hog on it,” explains the long time owner. “We looked at the schedule and said, �If she races in all these races and races well, that will be all right.’

“Although now…,” he adds, with a slow chuckle, “With the way she is shaping up we might wish we’d kept her in more.”

Porsche Hall will try and impress her owners for a second straight week in the eighth race on Hiawatha Horse Park’s Thursday evening program, which gets under way at 7:30 pm.

Complete entries are available at:

http://www.standardbredcanada.ca/entries/data/esarfth.html#N8