Naas
National Hunt

Naas is the Irish jumps year’s first Grade 1 stop and one of its quiet success stories. Founded by eight farmers and gentlemen who bought a hundred acres east of the town in 1922 — mid-Civil War, funded by local subscription — it ran its first meeting on 19 June 1924, marked its centenary under the same Naas Race Company (founding families still sit on the board), and has been named Racecourse of the Year at the Irish racehorse owners’ awards three years running, 2022–2024. Around twenty fixtures a year now run across both codes.

The track is a left-handed, galloping oval of about a mile and a half with a genuinely stiff four-furlong home straight rising to the line and a run-in of just over a furlong. Chases run on the outer course over eight fences a circuit — two open ditches among them, and the final two fences in that long straight; the hurdles track sits inside it, six flights to a circuit, eleven jumped over the Grade 1 trip of 2m4f. Long-striding gallopers who stay strongly are the house style.

January’s Grade 1 is the flagship: the Ballymore Novice Hurdle from 2026, after a decade as the Lawlor’s of Naas (its generic name is the Slaney Novice Hurdle). Elevated to Grade 1 in 2015, worth €100,000 with €60,000 to the winner, it has a roll of honour out of proportion to its age at the top level — Golden Cygnet won the 1978 renewal, and Envoi Allen (2020) and Bob Olinger (2021) both went straight on to Cheltenham Festival Grade 1 wins. Willie Mullins has won it nine times since 1983; Ruby Walsh rode four winners.

Swan’s ground observation is the most bettable sentence anyone has said about Naas. The course drains unevenly: the last seven furlongs — the business end — consistently ride quicker than the stretch out in the country beyond the winning post, which “can be very deep indeed” in a wet winter. A single going description flattens that difference. When the word is soft or worse, the real test out back is a grade deeper than the report suggests, and doubtful stayers are cooked before they ever reach the quicker ground home.

His “it paid to be handy” is quantified. Geegeez’s course study gives hold-up horses a combined Impact Value of just 0.28 across all hurdle trips at Naas — one of the weakest waiting-game records you will find anywhere — with prominent racers, not necessarily outright leaders, faring best. No clean front-runner-specific figure exists in public data, so this page won’t invent one; but every read, numeric and rider’s-eye, says the same thing: be up there.

Beyond the January showpiece, Naas carries a graded ladder through the whole jumps season — eleven graded or Listed races from January to November, including the new-for-2025 Grade 2 Racing Post Novice Chase on Grade 1 day and the Leinster National in March. Willie Mullins dominates the course: 97 wins at a 31.8% strike rate, and — rare for a superpower yard — profitable to back blind here (+2.85), with Noel Meade and Gordon Elliott next on 40 wins apiece.

One number and one rider’s sentence carry the Naas pace story. The number: hold-up horses have a combined Impact Value of 0.28 across all hurdle distances here (Geegeez course study) — barely a quarter of par, one of the weakest waiting records at any Irish track. The sentence: “it paid to be handy and it can be difficult to come from off the pace there” — Charlie Swan. No public source breaks out a front-runner-specific strike rate as distinct from prominent racers generally, so the box below shows the shape of the evidence rather than invented precision.

The stiff four-furlong straight looks like it should rescue closers, and it does rescue stayers — what it does not do is bail out horses giving the field first run. The galloping circuit lets leaders string rivals out, the rising finish blunts late acceleration, and in soft winters the deeper ground on the far side quietly does for anything held up and wide. Ride the handicaps in your head from the front third of the field.