Sequoiahs Spirit is one of the many horses Daryl Douglas has driven to victory this season
Daryl Douglas is now within 100 wins of becoming the first Australasian driver to pilot 400 winners in a season.
A quartet of winners at Mildura on Tuesday night presented the tireless reinsman with his second straight 300-win season.
Douglas entered the Mildura meeting with 298 Australian wins to his name, but made the trip home to Bendigo with 302 after scoring with Lombo Socialite ($1.50 fav), Blade Of Glory ($1.70 fav), Ava Living Legacy ($3.70) and Heza Hard Drive ($3.70).
Douglas’s brother Glenn, who is Victoria’s leading trainer, trained all four winners. Douglas, 35, said they went to Mildura confident of a good night but things didn’t pan out entirely how they thought.
“We thought we could win four races, but not necessarily with those four horses,” he said.
“One of the ones that did win we thought might struggle, but one of the others we took up that we thought would have won got beaten. We’re happy with four winners, though.”
Douglas remains the only Australasian male to have driven 300 winners in a season. He drove 320 winners last year, 51 less than the Australasian record set by Kerryn Manning in the 2002/03 season.
Douglas, who brought up his 300th winner on the 290th day of the season that started two days late due to Equine Influenza, has 73 days to break Manning’s record before the season ends on August 31.
But while not statistically minded – he didn’t even know he was on the cusp of 300 wins heading into the Mildura meeting – Douglas conceded it would be nice to be the first to the 400-win barrier.
“If we can keep going the way we are it’s definitely not beyond us, but the hard part is going to be keeping it going at the rate we’ve been going,” he said.
Douglas wasn’t the only driver to notch a milestone in the past week, with Jodi Quinlan joining Manning as the female drivers to have partnered 100 winners in Victoria this racing year.
Quinlan, who has also driven three interstate winners, brought up her seventh-straight home-state ton when she steered Land Of Panaarm to victory in the fourth event at Cranbourne last Saturday night.
The 33-year-old joins Douglas (294), Gavin Lang (145), Manning (131), Chris Alford (122) and Nathan Jack (108) as drivers to have driven 100 Victorian winners this season.
They should soon be joined by legendary Bendigo reinsman Brian Gath, who is just three wins short of his ninth century after winning two of the third first three races at Kilmore on Wednesday afternoon.