Does this horse suit the track? Every course and trip, mapped

Some horses love a sharp, turning track. Others need a long straight and a stiff finish. RaceMetrics now describes every course and trip in Britain and Ireland from Proform's course maps, and puts each runner's record on tracks like today's beside it.

The course and trip being run

In the System Builder, the Course & Going rules give the track type, from Very Sharp to Stiff, whether the trip turns left, right or runs straight, the gradient, the number of bends, how far it is from the stalls to the first bend and how much the course climbs or drops to the winning post. Over jumps there is the home straight, how much it climbs, the size of the circuit and the finish. Where a course has more than one layout you can pick it: Cheltenham's Old or New course, Aintree's National fences or Newmarket's July course. Every rule has its own breakdown table, and all are known before the race, so they work for today's qualifiers too.

Tracks like today's

For every runner, RaceMetrics looks at its earlier runs in the same code on courses and trips with the same track type, gradient and direction as today's, and shows the strike rate, the share of rivals beaten and its best speed figure there. The same record is kept for the trainer's runners and the sire's progeny over the last five years.

Since 2023, horses that beat 60 per cent of their rivals over three or more runs on similar tracks won 12.4 per cent of the time, against 10.7 per cent for every runner. Their A/E (actual winners against the number the Betfair SP expected) was 0.98, so the market already allows for course suitability: use these figures to read a race and sharpen other rules, not as a system on their own.

They help most where a horse has no record of its own. Flat debutants by sires whose progeny beat at least 55 per cent of their rivals on similar tracks won 13.3 per cent of the time, against 7.9 per cent for all debutants, and lost 2.3 per cent at Betfair SP against 10.5 per cent for debutants as a whole.

Where to find it

Every horse, trainer, jockey, owner, sire, dam and damsire profile has new breakdowns by track type, direction, gradient, bends, first bend, rise or fall and finish, each with a Build a System button. The similar-track figures can be added to My Card, and you can ask RaceMetrics which horses running today are proven on similar tracks. The System Builder is included with Proform Premium and RaceMetrics Pro.