Good Thinker needed all the favours in running to eek out his first victory in more than a year according to trainer Ricky Yiu Poon-fai, and then the upset winner had to survive a protest from the second placegetter to boot.
Yiu said the well-rated front-running ride from Dicky Lui Cheuk-yin on the 46-1 shot, plus his apprentice's seven-pound claim, were instrumental in the five-year-old snapping a 17-race winless streak that stretched back to the second race of last season.
"He half pinched the race," Yiu said of Lui's ride. "The kid did a good job, he rode him well and followed my instructions to perfection. There looked to be a bit of a track bias, so we took him to the front with the light-weight."
Good Thinker had won one from 33 previously for Yiu, and the trainer believes the handicappers should take into account Lui's claim and the soft nature of the win when re-assessing his horse, who won off a mark of 49 previously, and 44 yesterday.
"He is the bottom of Class Four - and that's where I've always considered him to be, at that level, but with the claim in reality he won off 37. They should treat him lightly anyway, because he half had the race handed to him with a soft lead."
Karis Teetan lodged an objection on behalf of the connections of second-placed Forever Ahead, claiming he was denied his rightful running by Good Thinker when attempting to take an inside run. Teetan then switched course and came within a short head of pulling off the win.
Stewards countered that Teetan only attempted to take the run at the 300m mark, before Lui "rolled in slightly", and overruled the objection.
Yiu said the stewards had got it right, and that the run Teetan claimed was rightfully his only appeared for a "split second".
"It's half a trap for jockeys to try and take that inside run - horses can often roll away from the rail slightly then come back in," he said. "The same sort of thing happened in race three, the horse rolled off and Tye Angland took a run and it came off - but sometimes you cannot - it depends on luck."
