In case anyone hadn’t noticed, the weather has disrupted the racing schedule and all the feature races we might have been assessing today on National Hunt cards at Chepstow, Sandown and Wetherby have fallen victim to the Big Freeze.

In the circumstances, UK racing has done well to stage 3 meetings today (with one in Ireland at Dundalk), but it’s all low level All Weather stuff.  Is there a feature race among this lot?  Not really, but we can use the Smartform database to rank prize money from all the races and see at least which is the most valuable.

A simple query as follows (taking under a second to run) shows us all the races scheduled to go ahead today, together with their prize money

>select scheduled_time, course, penalty_value from daily_races where meeting_date=CURDATE();

There are 29 in total.  If we want to see the top 3, ordered by their value, from the highest to the lowest, we can extend our query as follows.

>select scheduled_time, course, penalty_value from daily_races where meeting_date=CURDATE() order by penalty_value DESC limit 3;

What are they?



So, the 2.55 at Southwell has become our feature race.  Wow, the weather really is bad!

What will win?  A different question.  A race I’d prefer to swerve, though an interesting exchange play –  from a back-before-the-race to a lay-in-running perspective – is Cape Vale, who, according to our Leader and Lagger statistics, should set the pace.