The opening race on today’s card at Royal Ascot looks an interesting one from both a speed figure angle and a sectional timing one. All the money at the time of writing has been for the Aidan O’Brien trained Truly Enchanting this morning, who looked impressive when coming home over three lengths clear of Oxford Rock on Soft ground over the minimum trip at Tipperary. Grizzled handicappers with years of experience would look at a two year old race like this with seven unbeaten fillies in it, and such little form to go on as a no bet situation, but thanks to the recent publishing of sectional timing both by Coursetrack and Total Performance Data we can weigh up certain pieces of form with a bit more accuracy.

Looking at the fastest times on the clock from a final time perspective I awarded the following figures:

Using fastest speed figure as your method for selection would not take into account the fact that there are plenty of races that are slowly run (Rashabar’s lowly 95 figure from Newbury would be a recent example). Also, this race comes with the added obstacle of assessing Ultima Grace’s All-Weather romp at Keeneland (a track which I have yet to compile data for). With the recent publication of sectional timing at all Irish tracks it is possible to weigh up performances better. However, as this addition has only begun this year, we would need more data from these tracks going forward to compare and contrast. Coursetrack have been publishing their data for the past few years in the UK, and there are a few examples we can use to add some meat to the bone of the performances above.

Karl Burke has used the same path with Beautiful Diamond in 2023 as he is using with Leovanni this year. A winning performance over Nottingham’s five furlongs two weeks before today’s race for both fillies. Beautiful Diamond recorded a (102) speed figure at the same course and distance on the 7th June 2023. The track was riding a lot faster that day with a going description of Good To Firm (Firm in places) and times on the straight track were riding 0.22 seconds per furlong faster than standard (9 lengths per mile). I used the Abbey Heights race for assessing conditions on the day Leovanni raced, and the High Opinion race on the day Kassaya raced. Using the sectional timing data provided by Course Track adjusted to conditions on the day brought about the following comparisons:

TABLE HEADING ABBREVIATIONS EXPLAINED: 1ST SECT: First three furlong timed by Course Track; GA SECS/F: Going Allowance on the day in seconds per furlong; 1ST SECT ADJ: First three furlong time adjusted using calculated going allowance on the day; FINAL TIME ADJ: Final Time adjusted using going allowance on the day; FINAL SECT: Final Calculated sectional taking first sectional adjusted from final time adjusted.

Now I do realise that assessing races on Straight Turf tracks give us a lot less races to work with than say on an All-Weather track like Wolverhampton where all the racing take place on an oval (making such Turf race assessments less reliable), but we can only work with the limited information that we have. Using the highlighted data in columns five, seven and eight we can see that Leovanni’s final sectional of 22.51secs looks far superior to Beautiful Diamond’s 23.10secs from the same race at Nottingham last year, considering they reached the three furlong point in similar times (36.91) and (36.80) respectively. As with all racing, the performance a horse puts in previously is no guarantee to being the same performance next time out. Beautiful Diamond went on to finish third beaten two lengths in last year’s Queen Mary by Crimson Advocate, so connections should be quite hopeful of being right in the mix for the win in today’s race with Leovanni. I would not be put off by the current drift out to 14/1, as we saw yesterday with Metropolitan who drifted out to 40/1 before finishing third in yesterday’s St Jame’s Palace Stakes! It will be interesting to see how Kassaya performs as well today considering she made it to the three furlong point over a second faster than Leovanni at Nottingham’s five furlong distance, hence the slower finish. As with all two year old races it can be a fruitless task trying to predict future performances with such little evidence to go on, and even moreso when fillies are involved. Nevertheless, with the increase in published sectional timing out there I thought it would be interesting to look a bit deeper into the figures for today’s race.

Best of Luck with your selections today,

Graham