As the Flat season draws to a close, racing writer Colin Woods (Janus) gives a progress report on his ten-to-follow.

WITH six weeks of the Flat season remaining, those readers with sufficient faith to have invested a £10 level stake on all of the ten-to-follow horses listed in our annual Racing North supplement are in profit to the tune of £390.

In March, when I put together the elite squad, the dream was to help regular followers of the column to take some of the guesswork out of their betting strategies for the year, a plan that has produced a pleasing set of results.

Our mid-season update of the ten-to-follow horses featured on these pages in July focused mainly on the truly superb exploits of Mark Johnston's dual English and Irish 1,000 Guineas heroine Attraction, who, with Richard Whitaker's sprinter Steel Blue, got us off to a flyer with five victories between them.

But although we'd enjoyed an extremely satisfactory start, it is never wise to rest on one's laurels in racing and as time passed the punters brave enough to go back to the well with their winnings have not been disappointed.

In terms of sheer class, Mister Monet has been a most admirable of standard bearers, winning his last four races in the style of arguably the most improved colt in the country.

After picking up a weakly-contested mid-summer maiden event at Hamilton, the progressive Middleham-trained three-year-old followed up with three further fluent successes, cumulating with a prestigious and valuable Group 2 triumph at Deauville last month. Mister Monet's wins have all come at relatively miserly odds, so for serious financial gain we have Tim Easterby's Jeepstar to thank for a 10-1 win at Pontefract in August, plus, more recently, a 4-1 victory in the sought-after 12-furlong Edinburgh Gold Cup a couple of weeks ago.

Tim also came up trumps with his star speedster Somnus, who, like Mister Monet, travelled to Deauville's August Festival, benefiting from his trip to France by nabbing one of Europe's top sprint races, the Group 1 Prix Maurice de Gheest Stakes, at the hugely rewarding odds of 14-1.

Somnus then returned to these shores to contest another Group 1 affair, the Stanley Sprint at Haydock, a race in which he was tantalisingly touched off in a nail-biting photo-finish by Roger Charlton's flying filly, Tante Rose.

The remaining major contribution to the kitty has come from James Bethell's Granston, who wriggled his way through the pack at Ascot last Friday to land a competitive handicap at odds of 10-1.

Bethell's gutsy grey, already a 9-2 victor for us at Ripon in April, had been threatening to make a return to the winners' enclosure by previously reaching the frame at both Newmarket and Doncaster's St Leger meeting.

As far as the rest of the campaign is concerned, both Attraction and Mister Monet are on schedule to re-appear at Newmarket over the next four weeks, contesting races in which they hold leading chances and hopefully can add to our money-spinning haul.

Get more on racing at our Racing North site.