'I've been around for too long to get too excited, or too disappointed, by the way the horses run, but it's nice to have a couple of surprises like tonight.'

He confessed to a concern about Good Strike handling Happy Valley on his first appearance at the tricky circuit, but was even more surprised by Able Dragon's victory by more than three lengths - a win that might otherwise have given his apprentice, Yeung, a treble.

'After 14 starts without a win, yes, that was a big surprise, to win like that. Actually, Douglas was asking me for the ride on Able Dragon last season and kept asking me,' Lee said. 'I don't use Douglas much on my horses - not because I don't like him, but because he has a few other choices in races.

'A lot of the time you think you have him, then he will call before declarations and say he's riding something else. For me it's difficult to go to my owners then and say he isn't riding their horse, so I don't book him very often. But with this horse, he kept chasing the ride and when he asked me again lately, I said 'Okay'. Otherwise, I would have been happy to put Keith on the horse.'

Yeung's night was a happy one nevertheless, with his second victory a triumph for the young rider, who was able to get Good Strike out of the gates and into the race, which other senior riders had been unable to achieve.

'I was worried about him at Happy Valley,' Lee said. '[Good Strike] has been slowly away in the past and had some temperament problems and that is a concern at this track. But tonight he was fresh and when Keith had him sitting in midfield behind a strong pace, I was confident after 200 metres Good Strike was going to run a strong race.

'At Sha Tin he'd been struggling to get into 1,200 metre races last season, but was in touch over 1,000 metres. I knew he'd finish strongly with a light weight.'

As for Not Quite Perfect, the form book reads two wins on end over the Valley 1,000m, and Lee said that the little seven-year-old had given some signs of having come back well this season by putting on weight during the break.

'He's only small, but he put on 40 pounds in the summer, which he needed,' Lee said. 'Normally, I don't do much with him, but because he had put on some weight, I trained him a bit more than usual and he kept holding his condition even with the work, so I thought that was a good sign.'

Lee had no sooner joined Tony Cruz in the early championship lead with five winners than Cruz bounced back with one of his stable transfers during the summer, Royal Pegasus (Matthew Chadwick), who worked at both ends of the Cherry Handicap, 1,800m, before holding on for a narrow win.

It was the five-year-old's first start for Cruz as one of two horses transferred to the trainer during the break by the same owners. 'I got this horse and also Roma Pegasus and I'm grateful to the owners for giving me the chance to train them,' Cruz said.

'Royal Pegasus came here with a rating of 85 and had dropped down to 67 for tonight's race, so I think that he was handicapped to win and he had been going quite well.

'I'm happy to get any win I can with the horse as I don't know if he has a lot of scope. When you see him gallop head-on, he has a bad action, especially his hind legs, and that counts against him.'