SHEREE TOMLINSON FRONT-RUNNING WINNER
Overport Lodge-based junior reinswoman Sheree Tomlinson added to a growing record for Mark Jones employees in the Australasian Young Drivers Championship in Queensland in late November, 2018.
Sheree joined former employee Robbie Close as the 2015 Australasian Young Drivers Championship winner, with Michelle Neilson, also employed by Mark that term, third.
Mark himself won the Australasian title when a champion junior in 2000.
Sheree Tomlinson is awarded the 2018 Australasian Young Drivers Championship.
Sheree, who made a flying start, winning the first two heats, also picked up a third win, and recorded two seconds and a third in the nine heat series, held at Albion Park and Redcliffe.
She extended her front-running role to win the Garrard’s Australasian Young Drivers Championship to finish the series on 79 points, 21 ahead of Queensland’s Nathan Dawson, with NSW rep, Chris Geary, third, a further five points back.
Sheree won a Rio Mark 2 Sulky from sponsors Garrard’s for her efforts.
In her fourth season of race-driving, she has reined 76 NZ winners.
She won her first Group One, just over 12 months ago, in the 2017 Dominion Handicap with family horse, Amaretto Sun, trained by her grand-father, Ken Ford, at bolter’s odds, and experienced her first drive in a NZ Cup last month, reining Locharburn to finish 10th.
Third in last season’s NZ Junior Premiership, Sheree has 14 wins this term and trails John Morrison by one.
She returns to the NZ scene at Forbury on Thursday, with a chance of drawing level behind the Mark Jones-trained mare Michelle, in tonight’s junior drivers trot.
Mark Jones, incidentally, won his last two NZ Junior Drivers Premierships. In his last as a junior in the 1999-2000 season, he reined 100 winners in a season for the first time.
Mark, in his first term as an open driver, won the NZ Drivers Premiership with 116 wins _ at the time a record for a South Island-based driver.
At 22, he also became the youngest driver by a few months to win a NZ Drivers Premiership, eclipsing the legendary Maurice Holmes.
In 2003, Mark became a World Driving Champion, but in latter years has changed focus to running a top training operation.