Slow and steady was Dennis Yip Chor-hong's secret weapon to finally winning the race with his five-year-old of that name, more than a year after Secret Weapon had looked a horse of some promise.

In April last year, Secret Weapon made his local debut with a fourth over 1,200m that was the performance of a horse going somewhere, but a tendon injury to his left foreleg soon after changed everything.

The road back was a long one and it was February 2015 before Secret Weapon was back at the races and, according to Douglas Whyte, it was yesterday when he hit one that suited.

"Full credit to Dennis for how he has trained this horse. He has always wanted a mile, but Dennis hasn't rushed him there," Whyte said. "He's let him go 1,200m, 1,400m and increased his work each time and let him step up gradually to his right distance today. I always felt he would be a nice horse from the first time I rode him, but if he'd stepped up too quickly to 1,600m, he could have gone backwards, I feel."

Instead, the gelding ran out one of the more impressive winners on the day at Sha Tin as he wrapped up a winning double for Whyte, who scored for Tony Cruz on Wah May Baby earlier.

Whyte was allowed to control the speed of that Class Four on Wah May Baby and slow the field to a crawl before turning it into a 400m dash down the straight, to the cheers of one of his part-owners who was celebrating her birthday - and Whyte and Cruz gave the impression it had been Wah May Baby's birthday, too.

"He hasn't been helped by constant mucus problems but he is limited and I'm happy to win a race with him. The track is quite firm today and they still only ran very slow time," Cruz said. "Douglas really walked them through the first half of the race."

In turn, Wah May Baby was half of Cruz's winning "baby" double after Naughty Baby (Alvin Ng Ka-chun) took the previous race to give him a somewhat surprising fifth race win and the second from his last three starts.

"He's a difficult horse, he hangs all the time. He's done it from the first day and, even in his morning trackwork, he's very difficult to handle," Cruz said. "Actually, Naughty Baby's owner wanted to replace him, but we couldn't find the right horse to bring in. Now I think the owner is quite happy he's kept him going."