New Zealand three year old Mustang comes into today’s Geelong Classic as the unknown quantity as he has his first start on Australian soil.

He brings with him a promising home record where he’s claimed victories in his last two races.

That being said they were in a grade much lower than this, the first a three year old maiden over 1350m and the second a Rating 70 over a mile.

The interesting thing about this horse though is that in his five career starts to date the best surface he’s ever had has been a slow track.

In fact his other four runs have all come on heavy ground meaning we have no read on how he may handle the dead track today at Geelong.

It would be a big call to peg him as a wet track specialist when he hasn’t has so much as one run on top of the ground and trainer David Miller is as keen as anyone to see how he copes with it today.

“He’s a nice staying horse, we haven’t had any dry tracks to speak of so he hasn’t run on one,” he said.

“It’ll be a learning curve to see if he goes on top of the ground but we think he will.”

While his last win may have only been in a rating 70, it was against open company and he gave up a lot of ground in the early stages.

“He beat the older horses and came from a long way off them…he’s improved since then,” Miller said.

“He’s doing everything right…at this stage I’m really happy with what he’s doing.”

Yet another question mark on the horse is what he’ll do from barrier 14 and it seems Miller isn’t keen to give up the playbook just yet.

“We’ll be the dark horse for a bit longer,” he said.