Darley stallion Night of Thunder will stand at Dalham Hall in 2025 at a fee of €150,000, but earlier in his stud career he shuttled to Australia for one season in 2016 and a filly born in that foal crop won her first stakes race on Saturday at Caulfield at age seven.
Ridden by Craig Williams, Rumbled Again produced a career best performance in the Group III MRC Summoned Stakes (1400m) to win by three quarters of a length crediting her trainer Michael Trotter with his first stakes-winner.
Rumbled Again was retained to race by her breeders and has the overall record of seven wins and 10 placings from 36 starts with prizemoney topping $500,000.
She is the 59th stakes-winner worldwide for Dubawi’s top class son Night of Thunder and has an interesting profile as she is the last foal of her dam Adulate, who was 19 when she was born.
An unplaced half-sister by Flying Spur to Group II winner Spargo from Group II winner Adraanito, Adulate has proven a much better producer than a racehorse.
Retired from stud duty officially in 2019, Adulate had 10 named foals that all raced and seven of them won with Rumbled Again the last to be born and the first to gain Black Type.
It is very rare that a mare would have that many foals to perform at a certain level and then out of the blue a Group winner appears, although to be fair Night of Thunder is a very different class of stallion to all of those she visited beforehand.
Hindsight is a great judge though as at the time Night of Thunder was covering Adulate, he just another intriguing shuttle horse to consider at a fee of $16,500!
That lone crop of Australian conceived foals has produced 46 runners and 40 of them have won and six are stakes-winners headed by Group I winner Kukerachi with the SW to runner strike rate for those horses at 13%.
Night of Thunder’s overall statistics show him at 12% SW to runner with five Group I winners to his credit including the William Haggas trained rising four year-old Economics, who promises to be a G1 star on the Euro scene in 2024.
