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The Cliff Brown trained Inferno returned with a bang on Saturday when making light of his rivals in the seventh event.

Returning in a Class 3 event, the now four-year-old was very well placed at the weights and was sent out the $1.20 favourite.

Ridden for the first time by Vlad Duric, Inferno was never really in doubt and won easily over the 1200m journey.

Beginning fairly well from the middle draw, Inferno settled midfield, three-wide in the running line.

Starting his run approaching the turn, Duric circled the field, letting down well to level up to the lead approaching the 300m.

In a bit of a tussle with the Desmond Koh trained Legend Of The Sun, Inferno asserted his authority late, drawing away to score by a length and a quarter.

Rated 98 by Timeform, he wasn't required to run anywhere near that figure on Saturday, rated 85 in his return.

A winner of five of his six starts, he is one of the more promising horses in Singapore and is in the right hands with Cliff Brown.

"He was very impressive. He did it very easily," said Brown post race on Saturday.

"He also ran very good time. He will now head towards the Singapore Classic and eventually the Singapore Guineas, that's the plan for him."

The Singapore 3YO Classic [1400m] has had the '3YO' annotation dropped to the more generic Group 2 Singapore Classic given its rescheduling this year to August 30 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Interestingly, the Classic is still slated as the second Leg of the Singapore Three-Year-Old Challenge even if it is now open to Southern Hemisphere-bred four-year-olds.

The first Leg, the Group 3 Singapore Three-Year-Old Sprint [1200m] was cancelled outright while the Group 1 Singapore Guineas [1600m] is maintained as the third and final Leg on September 26.

All things being equal he is clearly the horse to beat, suspect he will only continue to improve over further, he is a very exciting horse.

Later on in the program we saw the much hyped clash between Mr Malek and Rocket Star.

Mr Malek proved the victor, however if you backed Rocket Star you are entitled to feel quite hard done by after he got taken off the track coming into the straight.

Mr Malek alternatively got the dream run through and did too well, scoring by half a length.

Rated 85 by Timeform, Mr Malek mirrored what Inferno did earlier and suspect he too can improve further second up.

Only lightly raced, he has won five of six starts and is clearly on an upward trajectory.

As for Rocket Star, he is rated 88 by Timeform and should be much better when seen beyond 1200m.

While only winning three from 11, he has never missed the money and has finished second on seven occasions.

He never runs a bad race and can't wait to see the pair face of with Inferno.

It looks a lot closer than what same may think.