My name is Navesh Ramdhani. I’m the General Manager of race courses for the Australian Turf Club in Sydney, Australia. We own and operate four race courses. We have multiple racing and training surfaces and a combine of about 2000 horses in training across our venues.
We were in the process of replacing a sand track here at Royal Randwick, and we were looking for some equipment that was going to maintain it to a level that we were happy with. And so, we came across the ABI Dragmaster, and we were very impressed by what we saw in the brochure. At the time, there wasn’t one in Australia so we had to import one from the US. When we got it here, it was quite daunting. It was quite a big machine and there was a lot going on for one piece of machinery.
When we put it out on the track to test it, it was absolutely fantastic and there’s a lot of things happening. It’s grooming. It’s leveling, and then it’s dragging it all in one. At the same time, particularly in Australia, it can get pretty warm. It was very dusty. So there’s a water jet at the back that can help just suppress the dust when you’re maintaining the track.
All of those components were absolutely fantastic for what we’re trying to achieve in the maintenance of our sand track and we’re very happy with what we were able to achieve with the ABI Dragmaster.
Whilst doing my research on the machinery, I also encountered some of ABIs other smaller machines. They have equipment that will satisfy all your requirements, but certainly on smaller application, smaller farms and arenas. There’s technology out there that cannot be ignored as a surface preparation tool for every track size and budget, and really the result speaks for themselves.