Top Greyhound Trainers at Towcester: Records, Styles and Form

In greyhound racing, trainers are not background figures. They decide which dog runs on which night, at which distance, from which trap preference. They manage weight, fitness and recovery between races. They choose when to step a dog up in grade and when to drop it back. At Towcester, three names have shaped the track’s competitive landscape more than any others: Mark Wallis, Patrick Janssens and Kevin Hutton. Between them, they account for a disproportionate share of the track’s major winners, championship titles and headline results.

Understanding who these trainers are, how they operate and when their runners tend to peak is not just background knowledge — it is a practical betting tool. A dog from a top kennel in good form at the right grade is a fundamentally different proposition from the same dog running out of sequence or below peak condition. The names behind the numbers matter, and at Towcester, these are the names you need to know.

Mark Wallis: 16-Time Champion and Towcester Pioneer

Mark Wallis operates out of Imperial Kennels and holds the record as the most decorated trainer in UK greyhound racing history. His sixteen Trainer of the Year titles — earned across 2005, 2008, 2009, 2012 to 2019, and 2021 to 2026 — represent a level of sustained dominance that has no equivalent in the sport. In 2026, he amassed 2,090 championship points — surpassing his own 2023 record of 1,591 — a mark that underlined just how far ahead of the field he operated.

Wallis’s connection to Towcester is foundational. When the greyhound track opened in December 2014 as the first purpose-built facility in Britain since 1995, Wallis was among the trainers attached to the venue during its early years. That period — 2014 to 2018 — saw him establish a deep understanding of the track’s characteristics: the 6-metre gradient, the wide bends, the sand surface and the way different running styles translated from other circuits. Even after his base of operations shifted, the knowledge stuck. His runners at Towcester consistently perform at or above their ratings, partly because the kennel’s preparation accounts for the track’s specific demands.

Describing his record-breaking 2023 campaign, Wallis noted that breaking more records during what he called a transitional year for his operation was particularly satisfying. That kind of understatement is typical: the results speak for themselves, and Wallis has never been the type to chase publicity. What he does chase is data. Imperial Kennels is known within the sport for its meticulous approach to preparation — fitness monitoring, trial running, and detailed attention to how individual dogs handle specific track geometries.

For punters, the practical takeaway is simple. When a Wallis-trained dog appears on a Towcester racecard, it is rarely underprepared. The kennel’s strike rate across UK tracks is consistently above average, and at Towcester — where the track’s quirks reward trainers who do their homework — that advantage compounds. Pay particular attention when a Wallis runner returns to Towcester after a spell at other venues. The kennel’s familiarity with the track often produces an immediate return to form that catches the market off guard.

Patrick Janssens and Kevin Hutton: The Towcester Specialists

If Wallis represents the national champion with deep Towcester roots, Patrick Janssens and Kevin Hutton are the trainers most closely identified with the track itself. Their records at Towcester are remarkable by any standard, and their contrasting styles give punters a useful framework for reading the racecard.

Janssens served as kennel hand to Wallis from 2005 to 2014 — nearly a decade working under the most successful trainer in the sport’s history. That apprenticeship was not wasted. When he set up his own training operation, the methods he had absorbed translated immediately into results. Janssens won the English Greyhound Derby in 2021 and again in 2026, both times at Towcester. His 2026 winner, Droopys Plunge, was a 10/1 outsider and the only British-trained finalist in a race dominated by Irish entries. That result alone tells you something about Janssens’s ability to prepare a dog for Towcester’s specific conditions: the gradient, the wide bends and the stamina demands of the 500-metre Derby distance.

Janssens’s training style favours peak conditioning over volume. He does not flood the racecard with entries; instead, he targets specific races where his dogs have a clear advantage in terms of distance, grade and trap draw. For punters, this means his runners are relatively few in number but disproportionately likely to be competitive. When a Janssens dog is entered at Towcester, especially at 480 m or 500 m, it warrants close attention.

Kevin Hutton’s Towcester credentials are built on consistency. He won the Trainers Championship at Towcester three years running — 2015, 2016 and 2017 — during the track’s formative period. That hat-trick came when Towcester was still establishing its identity as a GBGB venue, and Hutton was one of the trainers who helped define what successful racing at the track looked like. His dogs tend to be well-graded and reliable: not always the flashiest animals on the card, but frequently the ones that run to form and deliver predictable performances.

For a bettor, Hutton runners at Towcester represent a kind of safety net. They rarely produce career-best times out of nowhere, but they equally rarely underperform by wide margins. If you are building forecast and tricast bets — where consistency matters more than brilliance — a Hutton-trained runner holding its grade is a valuable inclusion.

Using Trainer Form in Your Towcester Betting

Trainer form is one of the most underused tools in greyhound betting. Most punters check recent results for the dog itself — finishing positions, times, sectional data — but far fewer look at the trainer’s overall performance across the current week or month. That is a missed opportunity, because trainers go through hot and cold patches just like any other competitor in sport.

A trainer’s recent form can reflect kennel-wide factors that affect multiple dogs simultaneously. A change in feeding regime, a new training routine, a batch of dogs returning from injury at the same time — these things do not show up on individual form lines, but they show up in the trainer’s aggregate strike rate. If a trainer who normally wins 15% of races has a week where they win 25%, something is going right at kennel level. The reverse is equally true: a sudden dip in strike rate may signal problems that will take a few weeks to resolve.

At Towcester specifically, trainer form interacts with track knowledge. A trainer who sends dogs to Towcester regularly will understand how the going changes through a meeting, which distances suit which types of runner, and how the gradient affects dogs of different weights and stamina profiles. A trainer running a dog at Towcester for the first time, transferred from a flat track like Romford, faces an adjustment period that may cost a run or two before the dog settles into the venue.

The practical routine is straightforward. Before a Towcester meeting, check the racecard for trainer names. For the two or three runners you are most interested in, look up the trainer’s results over the past fourteen days — not just at Towcester, but across all tracks. A trainer winning at a high rate nationally is running a sharp kennel. If they have a well-drawn dog in the right grade at Towcester tonight, the combination of hot kennel form, track familiarity and favourable conditions is the kind of convergence that produces winners at fair prices.