Newcastle’s Gosforth Park circuit uses a tapeta surface instead of the polytrack at lingfield, Kempton, and Chelmsford.
Starting with the minimum trip of 5f. There have only been 29 qualifying races during this time. Here are the run style splits in 8+ runner handicaps covering 1st Oct ’21 to 31st Aug ’22):
Front Runner: 19.51%
Prominent: 8.7%
Mid- Division: 8.57%
Hold Up: 6.48%
The front running stats (L) are slightly stronger than the long term figures – from 1st Jan 2017 to 30th Sept 2021: front runners were successful around 16% of the time, compared with 19.5% since. There’s not too much variance, especially considering the limited sample size we are working with.
The win percentages from 1st Jan 2017 to 30th Sept 2021 are the following:
Front Runner: 15.84%
Prominent: 7.79%
Mid- Division: 6.33%
Hold Up: 8.84%
The stats are all pretty similar and we can be fairly confident that the run style bias to front runners is still there.
As 5f biases go, it is not as strong as at some courses, but it is still significant. What is interesting is that prominent racers are not clearly second best. Normally, for most 5f trips they considerably outperform midfield and hold up horses.
Now we know predicting the front runner in a race is incredibly hard to do, but betting on all front runners since 2017 in 5f handicaps (8+ runners) would have given a profit to SP of +£161.51 to £1 level stakes, equating to a return-on-investment of +66%.
Hope you enjoyed this free UK horse racing tips and analysis.
Your number one horse racing tipster
Ron
