The Cran Dalgety-trained gelding arrived in Australia amid little fanfare despite a New Zealand Cup second placing, but he’ll return home one of Australasia’s best after upstaging a star-studded field in the Group 1.

The five-year-old dashed home along the sprint lane to relegate Smoken Up to yet another big-race minor placing with pacing immortal Blacks A Fake close up in third spot.

His mile rate of 1:55.7 was a record for the 2240-metre trip at the new home of Victorian harness racing, which was hard to comprehend for Dalgety given Bettors Strike didn’t win a race until midway through his three-year-old season.

“He took 16 starts to win his first race and here we are now competitive in Grand Circuit races, so not in our wildest dreams did we think we’d be here (celebrating a Victoria Cup win),” the trainer said.

“It was a bit embarrassing looking at the field before the race. I think he’d won $300,000 and Blacks A Fake had won something like $3.5 million, so it showed that he was only a little fish in this big pond.”

The son of Bettors Delight is a much bigger fish following his win, the 13^th of 51-start career, which swelled his earnings to $616,424.

He denied sentimental favourite Smoken Up the “major” most thought he deserved with his sprint-lane win.

With the benefit of starting directly behind polemarker Smoken Up, Bettors Strike’s whiz kid reinsman Dexter Dunn ensured he was hard up on the $2.30 favourite’s back coming out of the mobile and stuck there throughout the race.

Smoken Up set a reasonable tempo, covering the first half of the last mile in 59.9 seconds and while he still looked to be travelling despite a 28.2-sec third split, Bettors Strike was poised ominously on his back.

Smoken Up dropped Melpark Major, who raced outside the leader from the start, soon after straightening but then had to hold off a challenge from another former winner, Blacks A Fake.

Smoken Up dug deep to answer the Queensland champ’s challenge, but he couldn’t hold out Bettors Strike. He zipped home too quickly in a 27.3-sec final quarter to slice 0.5secs off Tintin In America’s track record.

On the line the $6.50 pop had 1.2 metres to spare over Smoken Up, who also finished second to Robin Hood in the 2007 Victoria Cup, with Blacks A Fake ($7.30) a further half-head away.

Plunge horse Monkey King ($6.60) produced an enormous run to grab fourth – just 3.2m from the winner – after racing towards the rear and coming wide on the home turn, while Melpark Major ($7.40) battled on for fifth placing.

Dalgety recognised the good draw played a part in the win, but won’t be sharing any of his winnings with the beaten brigade.

“It was a case of good luck more than good judgement because of the draw,” he said. “Of the 12 in the race, 10 of them probably would have won with the run we got, but we were just the ones lucky enough to have it on the night.”

The win capped a tumultuous couple of days for the Bettors Strike team, who on Thursday were stripped of half their Cranbourne Cup privileges when HRV stewards amended the result to a dead heat following a protest by connections of runner-up Ohoka Nevada against the photo finish result.