Graeme North bids farewell to the fibresand surface at Southwell and has a horse to watch at Sandown on Sunday and a jumper to follow too.
Possibly the person most lamenting the closure of Southwell’s fibresand surface shortly after 4.30pm on Sunday was trainer Philip Kirby who must have been thinking ‘what if’ after his charge Lord Torranaga had just run out a four-length winner trying the unique but soon-to-be-replaced surface for the first time, running a career best in the process.
In many respects, Lord Torranaga was typical of the horse Southwell catered for, an ordinary handicapper who never shone on turf but found the deeper synthetic surfaces more to his liking (his only other wins have come on tapeta at Wolverhampton and visco-ride at Pornichet in France) and who had plentiful options, usually in deep winter, to demonstrate that appetite.
More than one column has been written lately extolling those who ran themselves into fibresand folklore, but from a timefigure perspective the standout performance at Southwell on the surface there this century (the track also hosted turf racing until 2008) came from Kevin Ryan’s sprinter Evens And Odds in 2008 when posting a 113 in winning a decent handicap by five lengths.
As a matter of comparison, the highest timefigures recorded on the other tracks using artificial surfaces in the same time period have been 125 by Kachy at Lingfield (he’s also recorded 124 and 123 timefigures there), 119 by Hail The Chief at Wolverhampton (when the surface was still fibresand), 119 by Kameko at Newcastle, 119 by Hit The Bid at Dundalk, 118 by Chookie Royale at Chelmsford City and 117 by Angel’s Pursuit at Kempton. T
That snapshot rather sums up Southwell’s poor-relation standing among the all-weather tracks, unfairly so for a track that hosted Breeders’ Cup Classic preparations for both Galileo and Giant’s Causeway. Hopefully, the new tapeta surface will be accompanied by a desire to frame races that will attract better horses to its superb lay-out.
As I have written before, the one shortcoming most sectional models have in attempting to augment information derived from the overall time of a race is that they tend to incorporate one sectional point only, which means that much of the information that happened before, as well as after, the sectional point cannot always be properly encapsulated into one single upgrade (anyone wanting a more detailed example of the potential for misinformation resulting from this approach is referred to Watch And Learn column 7 where I examined the finishing speeds from two separate races over the same distance at Catterick).
One horse whose latest sectional upgrade underestimates the merit of his performance considerably is Snowalot, a four-year-old trained by James Ferguson who was second to Dancing Harry in a handicap at Sandown on his last appearance.
That handicap has worked out exceptionally well with not only Dancing Harry winning next time out but also the third, fourth and fifth as well. That information by itself would make Snowalot of significant interest next time out, but it’s what transpired after the sectional point (Timeform use 4f out because camera positioning at the track doesn’t allow reliable finishing sectionals to be taken any closer to the winning post) that makes Snowalot even more exciting.
From that point, Timeform have Snowalot coming out with marginally the best upgrade of all the horses in the first five (14lb, 3lb ahead of the winner Dancing Harry and 1lb ahead of fifth-placed Byron Hill). That’s all well and good, but the race in question didn’t start to begin in earnest until the 3f marker – Dancing Harry’s overall timefigure was only 53, 37lb below his performance rating – and only really took off properly with a quarter mile still to run.
Using the times available on the Racing TV website and revising the sectional calculation used by Timeform to account for the increasingly dwindling proportion the sectional distance makes up of the overall race distance (the further the relationship between the sectional distance and the overall race distance varies from an optimal relationship - roughly 28% - the less informative the sectional upgrade becomes unless it is recalibrated because the sectional distance becomes too short to generate a meaningful upgrade) reveals that Snowalot’s upgrade superiority over Dancing Harry increases (as I calculate it) from the 3lb Timeform had 4f out to 7lb from 3f out, 12lb from 2f out and 8lb from 1f out.
On average, that gives Snowalot an extra 6lb (or somewhere between three and four lengths) over Dancing Harry by using a combination of sectional points on top of the 3lb Timeform had already awarded him. Clearly Snowalot should have won the Sandown race with some ease, as Timeform’s race report available on Race Passes implies, and there will be a good number of eyes on him back there this Sunday where he bids to get back to winning ways kept to the same distance.
Another horse whose achievement last time out has been undercooked by sectional upgrades is Perfect Power, who runs this week not in the Gimcrack at York as might have been expected but across the channel instead in the Prix Morny at Deauville.
Perfect Power earned the biggest upgrade in the Richmond Stakes from Timeform – 6lb as opposed to the 5lb next-best-upgrade given to the winner Asymmetric – but those upgrades, like those from Sandown, are also taken from 4f out for the same reason.
Using the logic outlined above, while extrapolating expecting finishing speeds for the last 3f, 2f and 1f from a universal finishing speed model revised to incorporate the finishing par already in place at Goodwood from 4f out and the downhill nature of the closing stages, we get Perfect Power coming out with a 5lb better upgrade than Asymmetric from 3f out, 8lb better upgrade from 2f out and 5lb from 1f out during which furlong his rider was always looking for a clear run.
I’m still not sure why Perfect Power was set so much to do at Goodwood, or indeed why he was sent off at 7/1 when his previous form was so strong, but I’m certain he was (as I suspected beforehand) the best horse in the Richmond by some way.
Fourth-placed Ebro River has since come out and won the Group One Phoenix Stakes, and so long as he travels over to France happily, Perfect Power has a good chance of landing a Group One this weekend too.
After a break of a couple of weeks the National Hunt season was up and running again at Market Rasen and Perth on Saturday and there was one performance in particular that caught my eye at the former venue in one of the four races on the card over hurdles.
The display in question came from White Walker, who managed to win the staying handicap hurdle despite being 3lb out of the handicap and held up in a detached last place until the final circuit in a slowly-run race.
Incorporating sectional times into form analysis over jumps still isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but bearing in mind that horses running at shorter distances generally run faster than do those over longer distances, and more highly-rated horses run faster than lesser-rated ones, it’s worth noting that White Walker, the lowest-rated of the four hurdle winners and racing over easily the longest trip of all of them, ran the last circuit (time taken from the last hurdle on the penultimate circuit) 0.6 seconds faster than the opening 112-rated winner Coole Well, 3.8 seconds faster than the 116-rated Fontana Ellissi and 1.9 seconds faster than the 101-rated winner Near Kettering while covering the distance from the third last no slower than any of those rivals either, despite two of those other races being steadily run also.
Those comparisons suggest that the progressive White Walker, who coasted into the race at Market Rasen very easily, is going to be well treated even after the 8lb rise he has received for that win comes into effect, and a close look at his lines of form suggest that Glendruid, Lady P and Norley, all of whom have come up against him lately, will all be of interest too in the next few weeks before the season starts to crank up a gear.