Today the 5-year-old, with Wanganui jockey Lisa Allpress, lines up in the feature $250,000 Livamol Classic race at 4.38pm as a $4.50 favourite on the tote over 2040m in the final leg of the Bostock NZ Spring Racing Carnival trilogy.
"We thought she was finished so we're lucky to see her back and she's come a long way," he says of the horse who made her intentions clear as early as last December when she powered to victory at Te Rapa shortly before Christmas.
The trainers have Melbourne Cup plans for her, too, depending on how she goes here and, perhaps, the Rotorua Plate in a fortnight.
In the lead-up races to today's classic, Pondarosa Miss finished eighth at the group one 1400m Makfi Challenge Stakes on August 29 here on a dead 5 track and was 11th in the 1200m Foxbridge Plate.
Hollinshead has no qualms with the No1 barrier for a horse he classes as "tough as nails".
"I don't think it makes much difference. In fact it's a little bit better than coming from the outside."
He says today's classic is her favourite distance.
"We'll be taking the blinkers off because at the trials she's running dead straight."
The High Chaparral-sired Pondarosa Miss is out of Bak Da Princess and has a career earnings of $235,935 primarily off a slow track.
The Hastings track was a dead 5 yesterday after a week of predominantly fine, windswept weather.
Her full brother, Ecuador, sold for $360,000 before going on to win a group one $1 million race.
Hollinshead describes that as "the difference between fillies and colts".
A paltry bid for Pondarosa Miss didn't cut it for the Hollinsheads who bred her.
"She won a group one and was worth keeping," says Darryl Hollinshead who has learned the tricks of the trade from his father "but we work things out between us".
"He's from a line of dairy farmers first and then they play with horses after," he says of the pair who are now fulltime breeders and trainers.
They have 11 horses in training but Darryl says they have 4-5 broodmares and they tend to sell horses at the annual Karaka Sales.
Reflecting on the Windsor Park Plate meeting abandoned here a fortnight ago because of excess water making the track treacherous at the 800m mark, Hollinshead says thought should have been given to using "the biggest ground breaker" often employed extensively at meetings in Waipa.
Stipendiary stewards made the call after three races in the interests of rider and horse safety.
Says Hollinshead: "The administrators did not listen to the trainers and jockeys."
They did not, he says, listen to NZ Racing Hall of Famer Graeme Rogerson, a trainer, either.
"Everyone who took horses there to win races was hugely out of pocket," he says.
The postponed group 3 $70,000 Gold Trials Stakes from the Windsor Plate meeting will be run today at 1.43pm.
The group 1 Windsor Plate will be co-opted with the Trentham programme in Wellington on October 24.
That means $270,000 of stake money will be paid out but the overall loss of revenue is bigger in what new HB Racing chief executive Andrew Castles concedes is "devastating" and will have tarnished the venue's image overseas.
