Hope and Star go to Sandringham Driving Trials
In September 2017, Hannah and Matt Illston-Barsby offered Hope and Star a forever home with a view to them eventually become driving ponies. Seven years on and they are well on their way to a successful driving career.
After a successful indoor driving season gaining the Midlands Indoor Pairs Driving Champions, we are now in full swing on the outdoor season. This is our first competitive year so we needed to get two full events signed off so that we can compete nationally.
Due to wet ground conditions a lot of events have been cancelled so we started late but our first event was at Thoresby Park. We were thrilled with Hope and Star’s performance and completed the event safely and got their first event signed off. When we returned home our trainer Robert Buck from GB Pod Training group wanted to improve our dressage score. We made a plan that we needed to switch the ponies sides so we now have Hope on the left and Star on the right, this is due to Hope pulling away from the pole and not being completely settled in her work which was causing us costly marks in the dressage phase. We had to do a lot of long reining in preparation before changing them over, but the results have made such a difference and Hope no longer pulls away and is more settled in her work. We have also invested in a different carriage which is designed to cope with the different terrains you get and a bonus is that it is silver and green, so it goes well with our Dengie green marathon colours!
We felt ready for our next event Sandringham which has been a dream for both Matt and I to compete there, so we were very excited. We needed to stay focused on our aim, which was to just get round the event safely and complete, so we would get our last event signed off and receive our competency card to compete nationally. The first phase was dressage and all our hard work paid off as we improved our dressage score from our previous event by reducing 13 penalty points and were lying 5th overnight in our class; we were thrilled! Next day was Marathon Day and this was a huge ask as it was a big event, but we managed to keep it together and complete with no penalties and kept our 5th position! The last day was a Cones course and another very impressive set up with a JCB arch to drive under. We had a fabulous drive just two cones knocked and a few time penalties, but everyone struggled to keep within time, and we finished in 5th position and our card signed off so we can now compete nationally!
We are absolutely over the moon with how we are starting our journey into carriage driving and we are so lucky to have the fantastic support from Dengie Performance Horse Nutritionist, Claire Akers to make sure Hope and Star are kept in their best condition. They are looking fabulous on Dengie Performance Fibre!
