The small Cambridge establishment of Lyndhurst Farm has joined an elite group of studs to have sold the top-priced yearling at Karaka more than once.

Lyndhurst sold the Fastnet Rock-Il Quello Veloce filly to New Zealand’s leading yearling buyer David Ellis for $NZ800,000 ($A748,678) after a spirited bidding duel with Australian trainer David Hayes.

It’s the second time the boutique farm Lyndhurst, run by Mark and Shelley Treweek, has provided the top lot after selling an Encosta de Lago-Giovana colt for $800,000 in 2009.

“We’re really proud of it because we’re a small set-up,” Mark Treweek said.

“We put a lot of work in and it’s really good to get the results for the clients when they trust us with their horses that can be worth so much money.”

Lyndhurst prepared the filly on behalf of Henry Field of Newgate Farm in Scone, New South Wales.

Treweek said Field decided New Zealand was the best place to sell a filly out of Il Quello Veloce, a group one-winning filly in New Zealand.

Field bought Il Quello Veloce off the track but sold her last year at a broodmare sale to Pencarrow Stud of Cambridge, the farm owned the Vela brothers who also own NZ Bloodstock.

Ellis, once again the leading buyer at the sale, said he’d waited all sale to buy the filly, who went through the ring late.

“It is nerve-racking when they’re right at the end of the sale because everything else that we wanted had already been sold,” he said.

“But I’ve been coming to this sale since 1988 and I can’t remember a better quality filly, certainly in the last 10 years.”

The filly was the sale-topper by $200,000 from a Fastnet Rock-Dance On By colt sold on behalf of Brendan and Jo Lindsay by Waikato Stud, who for the second year in a row topped the sale aggregate.

Article from justhorseracing.com.au