For Reg Bond, horseracing is business and, as the tyre distributor tells Turf Talk, it’s all about customer satisfaction

BOND Thoroughbred Corporation. The name sounds more like a pipe factory than a maker of horseracing dreams.

19th-century cotton mills and soot-covered chimney stacks belching smoke into the stratosphere, you get the picture.

The reality is mares relaxing in paddocks with their tiny foals springing step by step in accompaniment.

When Reg Bond determined to give racing the same sort of focus that had made him a multi-millionaire Pocklington tyre distributor, it was to a clay pit in Yapham Mill that he turned to establish his now ever-growing stud empire.

“Charlie, my son, and I share the business,” he explains. “He bought the land when it became available.

“We just developed and developed and fenced it. It’s on a lot of clay, so the water stands, but it is on a slope.

“I’ve been very successful in business and what they say is ‘if you’ve got something, and you’ve got the sole rights to that product for the UK, then you can advertise it’.

“We’ll have about six syndicate horses and five of them have won. A lot of people will be in horse racing for 20 years and will never have a winner.

“How can we do it? Well, the stallion is ours. We have our own stud, we raise the foals and see what they are like.

“Karen, my stud manager, is absolutely brilliant and she can tell us whether a horse will be a two-year-old or a three-year-old.”

Bond, who estimates he has about 25 horses in training, has seen plenty of high achievers come from Yapham Mill.

Through his prodigious stallions Monsieur Bond and Misu Bond, the likes of Ladies Are Forever, Gilt Edge Girl and Hoof It have helped his corporation achieve a growing reputation.

“The best mare that I have got, in breeding, is Forever Bond,” Bond adds. “She had five horses running at different ages levels last year and all five won. She was voted mare of 2012. It’s a good achievement from one mare.

“She will be nine or ten now, it’s unbelievable and she is very popular at stud. She is a big, strong girl.

“We’ve still got Monsieur Bond and Misu Bond. I read an article the other day that said Monsieur Bond has had over 190 winners.

“Next year, 2014, he will have over 120 horses in racing. The first season we had 20 covers for him, and ten or 12 of them were my own mares, because he wasn’t known.

“The next year we maybe had up to 50. After that we had 120. This is when Gilt Edge Girl won the big Group 1 in France.”

Among this year’s collection of foals is the new apple of Bond’s eye.

“The best looking horse I’ve ever seen as a foal was this year’s Monsieur Bond out of Forever’s Girl. He is a full brother to Hoof It,” he said.

“I saw him and he had only been born two or three hours earlier and I then saw a photograph after three or four days and I am so proud of this horse. He was four days old in that picture. He’s 11 months now. It would have to be a lot of money to buy him.

“I’ve had 11 foals this year and ten I will sell. I don’t know about him. I think he might be my pet. We’ve just got to see how he develops.”

With Ladies Are Forever set to join the growing band of top-drawer stallions and mares once her career on the track comes to an end later this year, Bond may have a new generation of brilliant young racehorses about to develop.

But that’s not why he does it.

He explained: “We are in a position and we can produce a horse. We can have a lot of other people’s mares to our stallions, we can produce from our own mares – the 11 or 12 we have got now – and we have added two more.

“I get my pleasure when someone else has invested in one of my horses, been covered by Monsieur Bond or Misu Bond, and when they win.

“Then they’ll come back with their filly again. It’s all about a team of people.”