Racing Insights, Wednesday 18/01/23

HINT: It can help to cross refer the profit figures of the trainer with their win/place percentage. A few big priced winners can mean a trainer has a high profit number but a low strike rate. You may need to be very patient, and a bit lucky, to come out in front this way! As ever, please refer to our User Guide for further information.

We also have our usual smattering of free fully functional racecards, but after Newbury's cancellation they just cover...

• 3.10 Dundalk
• 6.45 Southwell

My settings for the TS report...

...have sadly generated no horses to look at, so my dislike of Irish racing leaves me with Hobson's Choice, the 6.45 Southwell, a 7-runner, Class 5, Fillies' A/W handicap over a left handed 7f on standard tapeta...

Finery & Falesia Beach both won LTO and Cailin Saoirse made the frame, beaten by just two necks. She has, however, won two of her last four, butr the rest of the field is winless in five.

Divine Connection and Cailin Saoirse both step up from Class 6, whilst Finery and Theotherside step down from classes 4 and 3 respectively. Falesia Beach wears blinkers for the first time and the entire field has raced in the last six weeks with four of them (Finery, Queen of Burgundy, Divine Connection & Cailin Saoirse) already 'out' this year.

Instant Expert, our collateral form tool, says that all bar Theotherside and Grey Belle have won the A/W previously and of the five past A/W winners, three have won at Class 5, two have won here at Southwell and all five have scored over this trip. Theotherside does have a Class 5 win on turf, but Grey Belle's sole career win from fourteen starts was over a mile on turf...

LTO winner Finery's last seven runs have been on the A/W and she has 3 wins and 2 places from those efforts over the last four months and she's one of just two course and distance winners, the other being Falesia Beach. Finery is up 5lbs for last Tuesday's comfortable C&D success, but she clearly looks the one to beat on both recent form and Instant Expert. Theotherside has struggled here at Southwell, Grey Belle just doesn't win often enough and Divine Connection has too many going/distance failures to her name for my liking.

We have limited draw/pace data for Southwell with the tapeta track being little more than a year old, so we've made some minor tweaks to the filter parameters to get some data to work with as follows...

The basic premise here is that the higher the draw the better for win purposes with mid-draws best for places, but a quick look at stall-by-stall data...

...suggests there's not much in it and the stall 3-6 grouping has fared best. With regards to pace, again we've used the same parameters and again, there's not a great deal in it...

...and the lack of major bias for draw or pace is reflected by how much green there is on the pace/draw heat map...

Our field's last four outings have been run as follows...

...suggesting that Finery and Queen of Burgundy from stalls 2 and 6 might be the ones setting the fractions with Cailin Saoirse the likely back marker and when we put those average pace scores and the draw onto the heat map...

...the four most likely to succeed would appear to be Finery, Falesia Beach, Queen of Burgundy and Divine Connection

Summary

I'm of the opinion that in relatively small fields with little/no bias for draw and/or pace, then the best horses generally win and the two to beat here should be Finery and Falesia Beach and probably in that order.

That then leaves Queen of Burgundy and Divine Connection to fight it out for a place and heat map aside, the latter really doesn't tick any boxes.

Sadly the market has the same 1-2-3 as we've arrived at and they're best priced at 9/4, 7/2 and 4/1 respectively.