Some thoughts on the first big handicap of the Flat season, using Smartform for trends analysis.

First, find the previous winners of the race and look at some of their attributes to establish a likely winner profile..

This was trickier than anticipated, since in the first query (limited to race_name LIKE “%Lincoln%” and course=”Doncaster”) the 2006 and 2007 runnings of the race appeared to have gone missing!  Stripping off the course condition reminds us that the 2006 running was at Redcar and the 2007 running was at Newcastle.  Nothing is ever simple in horseracing 🙂

So, here we have the basic trends:

Of course we can look at a lot more trending information for each runner, but let’s start with some things we can easily gather from the racecard – especially as this seems to whittle down the field considerably.

In recent years this is a 4 year-olds’ race.  This is quite striking.  Last year, only 5 of the 21 runners were 4 year olds, the year before 7 out of 20, and in 2008, 8 out of 21.  In the last 8 years (the timespan for Smartform), a 4 year old has won 6 out of 8 runnings.

Looking at this year’s 4 year olds we can use a one line Smartform query (with the simple condition “age=4”) to give us the following table:

We’ve added in the draw, since we’re going to look at the best place for pace in the race to help us make a decision.

So, is there a pace advantage where any of these are drawn?  Well, Gunner Lindley looks one of the likeliest to make a strong pace in his own right, along with Eton Rifles.  However, there are horses with good early pace in many places on the track today, so it’s hard to say in advance that any of these will be inconvenienced – it all depends how their jockeys ride it and where they split.

If we add in recent trainer form, Richard Hannon has by far the best recent (ie. 14 day) strike rate coming into today’s race, so Fremont may be worth a second look at a double figure price, and, along with the market leader, Taqleed, has to be of interest.