Ultima Handicap Chase – Champion Day

The Ultima Handicap Chase is one of the big field, competitive handicaps that Cheltenham is famous for offering—an absolute minefield for punters to solve. If you find the winner of this contest, you’re doing well!

Ran over three miles and one furlong, this is not a test for the faint-hearted, and it’s why it has become the Cheltenham Festival race for potential Grand National runners at Aintree a month later.

With 20 fences and a tightly packed field at the weights, if you love getting stuck into the form book, this is one of the races you’ll really enjoy on Champion Day at Cheltenham.

Originally known as the National Hunt Handicap Chase, the race’s name has included a sponsor ever since 1981 when the Ritz Club took on sponsorship duties. That lasted until 1996, with Astec Buzz Shop having a go for one year in 1997 before William Hill sponsored it between 1998 and 2010. In 2011 the race took on a personal meaning when the racehorse owner Andy Stewart and his family sponsored it in honour of the Spinal Research charity; it was the Stewart Family Spinal Research Handicap Chase for one year only. Since 2015 Ultima Business Solutions have sponsored the race.

Race Facts

This left-handed race is run over three miles and one furlong on Cheltenham’s Old Course. It is for horses aged five and over and they have to jump twenty fences before they get to the home stretch. Because this is a handicap race there are no real specifications on a horses weight. Instead the handicapper adds different weights to the horses to ensure that it is run on as level a playing field as possible.

In 2017 the winner of the race, Un Temps Pour Tout won it for the second year in a row with jockey Tom Scudamore, who followed in his father’s footsteps when he won it for the first time in 2008, with Peter Scudamore winning it back in 1986. David Pipe was the winning trainer for all three of Tom Scudamore’s victories.  In 2020 trainer David Brigewater won with The Conditional, he won the race as a jockey in 1997.

Only 15% of races since 2000 have been won by the favourite, which shows this is a wide open race.

Previous Winners

Race Trivia

Records for the race only go back as far as 1946, so it’s impossible to say that information on its most successful participants is definitive. Even so, the Handicap Chase is one that trainers love to win more than once. Lucinda Russell, Bob Turnell, David Pipe and Tom Dreaper have all won it three times. Interestingly, three victories isn’t enough to earn the right to be called the race’s most successful trainer, as both Fulke Walwyn and Fred Rimell have won it four times.  Jonjo O’Neill has also won it four times now, the last of which in 2026 was as a joint-trainer with AJ O’Neill.

Eleven different jockeys have won the Handicap Chase on two occasions. Names that have achieved that include Richard Dunwoody, Pat Taaffe and Barry Geraghty but, once again, that’s not enough to claim to be the race’s best jockey. For a time that honour belonged solely to Robert Thornton, whose wins in 2004, 2005 and 2011 were enough to put him ahead of his rivals. When Tom Scudamore came home for the second consecutive year on the back of Un Temps Pour Tout, however, that was all change.  Then Richie McLernon matched that feat in 2026.  Those three jockeys all share the honour with three wins.

If you’re the sort of punter that likes to know about where horses may go in the future then this is something you’ll want to bear in mind: a number of winners of this race have gone on to win the Grand National in the future. Sometimes they’ve even won it in the same year as Aintree’s most famous race, though often they do so in subsequent years. Winners of both include Team Spirit, Rough Quest and Royal Tan.

In 2023 Corach Rambler became the fourth horse to win the race twice, trained by Lucinda Russell and ridden by Derek Fox. In 2023 he won the Grand National too.  Of the four horses that have won this race twice only Corach Rambler has gone on to win the National – none of Sentina, Scot Lane or Un Temps Pour Tout have then gone on to win it.

Well known Grand National runner Vintage Clouds won the race in 2021 at the fifth time of asking.  Unfortunately there were no crowds that year due to the Covid-19 pandemic, otherwise that would have produced a hell of a roar from the stands.

A Race to Watch Grand National Contenders

Running in the Ultima Handicap Chase before running in the Grand National will usually mean a gap of around four weeks before the big one, so it’s not a path that many take. Most horses will skip Cheltenham.

However, for those who do want to run at both of the big spring meetings, this is the race where you will find potential Grand National runners taking part.
A mile and one furlong shorter than the Grand National distance, it’s not as gruelling, but still a big enough test to give these horses what they want.

In 2023, Corach Rambler had a fantastic spring, first of all winning the Ultima Handicap Chase for the second year in a row. But then, after that second win, he went to Aintree and won the Grand National, landing two big handicaps in the space of a month.

The one positive for Grand National contenders coming here is that the Cheltenham Festival comes after weights are published for the big race. This means that if they go to Cheltenham and perform well, they cannot go up in the weights for the Grand National, as their weight is already fixed.