Racing Insights, Tuesday 24/01/23 geegeez.co.uk

Tuesday's free offering from the GOLD service is the The Shortlist feature, a simple – and usually brief – report highlighting those horses with a largely ‘green’ profile in the Instant Expert Report each day. It covers win or place stats, and can be viewed for both today’s and tomorrow’s racing.

GREENis good (33% or better win rate) – worth 3 points
AMBERis quite good (16-32% win rate) – worth 1 point
REDis not so good (0-15% win rate) – worth -1 points
GREY means there is no available data for that factor - worth 0 points

The final column, ‘Score’, is the sum of the previous five ‘colour’ columns, with 15 being an all green profile, and 9 being the lowest score appearing on this report.

HINT: The best bets are not necessarily the highest scores. Rather, they are often the biggest difference between a Shortlist horse and the ‘best of the rest’ in that race.

N.B. Shortlist selections are unlikely to make a profit, at SP at least, to blind backing. Our recommendation is – and has always been – that The Shortlist should be a starting point rather than an end in itself. That said, it continues to highlight horses whose chance is better than recent form - and its odds - imply. As ever, please refer to our User Guide for further information!

Sadly due to postponement of so much racing, there are no qualifiers this Tuesday. We do still, however, have our daily list of 'free' racecards, but that has also been badly affected...

12.40 Down Royal
1.00 Exeter
1.25 Leicester
6.00 Southwell

...leaving us with a 20-runner maiden hurdle and an A/W maiden! Neither appeal to me to be honest and with just one mainland UK meeting set to go ahead, I'll swerve the maiden and take a look what should be the best on the card, the 7.00 Southwell. It's a competitive-looking, 7-runner, Class 3, 4yo+ A/W handicap over a straight 5f on standard tapeta...

My initial thoughts were that it's a 3-horse race between (in card order) Vespasian, Hiya Maite and Kim Wexler, but let's see what we can find.

Vespasian won five starts ago and has made the frame in his last two starts without winning, but Hiya Maite, Kim Wexler and Murbih all have a win and a runner-up finish from their last two with Kim Wexler our only LTO winner. All of that trio step up in class today with the latter pair (Kim Wexler and Murbih) up two classes and Hiya Maite up one.

The top three on the card are winless in 11, 10 and 7 races respectively, but Tolstoy drops in class here and has been noted as a fast finisher. All bar Strong Johnson have raced in the last four weeks, but he has been off for just over 15 weeks, during which he has moved yards and had a wind operation. Aside from the bottom three on the card who are all course and distance winners, he's the only other to have won at this 5f trip and none of the top four on the card have won at Southwell.

Strong Johnson is also the only one yet to win on the A/W, he's one of four previous Class 3 winners and one of two never to have raced here at Southwell before, according to Instant Expert...

...whilst those numbers filtered into A/W runs only look like this...

Murbih is the interesting one to emerge from Instant Expert and he's in decent form as noted at the top of the piece. He has made the frame in half of his 10 A/W starts, winning twice overall and finishing 30312 in five visits here. he receives weight all round and is currently making more appeal to me than Vespasian.

Southwell's tapeta is still fairly 'new' and as such we don't have as much pace/draw data as we do for other tracks, but what little we do have on the draw surprised me a little initially...

Stall by stall analysis doesn't reflect such a great high to low bias, though...

And that's reassuring to me, as I believe there shouldn't really be much in the draw over a straight 5f and that it's the way you approach the race that is key. Most (not all) 5f sprints favour those setting the pace and in that small sample above it has certainly been the case...

...and the resultant pace/draw heat map suggests that mid to highly-drawn leaders have the best chance...

*the high draw mid-div 100% record is from 1 horse

So, let's check the field's most recent outing to try to work out who might set the pace...

...and it certainly looks like they'll be hard at it from the start.

Kim Wexler & Strong Johnson are in stalls 3 & 4 with Murbih in 5 and Vespasian widest in 7. Vespasian probably edges it here, but other aspects of the toolkit analysis suggest Murbih would be a better bet of the two.

Summary

I started out with Vespasian, Hiya Maite and Kim Wexler uppermost in my mind, but I've arrived at a point here I think Murbih would be a better option than Vespasian. This means That I'm going to rule both out, because I don't think Murbih beats Kim Wexler. They were first and second home here over course and distance with Kim Wexler prevailing by a length and a half off equal weights. Murbih has been raised a pound for that run and KW is up 5lbs but now has an in-form 5lb claimer in the saddle, so I think the race's only mare still holds Murbih.

So that's Kim Wexler in my top 2 along with Hiya Maite, who is also in good form, only up one class as opposed to KW's two, he scored well on Instant Expert and is drawn high. The only possible issues are that he's 7lbs higher than his win two starts ago and that he might struggle for position with at least three or four getting first run on him.

Should be an interesting tussle, but I think 5/1 about Kim Wexler is a tidy price. Murbih is 15/2 with bet365 and they're paying three places, so he could be worth considering from an E/W perspective.

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