Shooting Stars never stop even when they reach the top. Welcome to Stars Of The Clock, a place where I will discuss the beautiful sport of Flat Racing. Not a website dedicated to Frankie Goes To Hollywood as the title may imply. Although I did meet Paul Rutherford once backstage at Morrissey’s 45th birthday party. A tale for another day no doubt.

Thirty years is a long time to be studying anything. But that’s the lifespan of my interest in horse racing. One day in 1993 an Australian man I worked with enquired as to what my bets for Cheltenham would be. I had no idea what the hell he was referring to. I decided to pop into one of these brightly lit shops I regularly passed by and the rest is history. My background of playing sports instantly drew me to the newspapers on the wall and the delightful colours of the silks beside each horse’s name. The bold headlines on the wall from the journalists “Andrew’s First To Take The Coral Cup” were mesmerising. It was sports done to a different level than I was used to and in the words of Harry Findlay I had just entered the Magic Kingdom.

Needless to say Andrew’s First did not win The Coral Cup despite my £1 contribution. The Magic Kingdom turned out to be The Magic Sign (I had entered a Ladbrokes Betting Office at the time) who I later found out were not as welcoming to my bets as they got bigger and more successful over the years. But more on that later. As with most gamblers the early years will be filled with many losing dockets and the burning desire to figure out how the hell the game works. As I lived close by to a library, while growing up, books were one of my main passions. So naturally I knew I was going to have to read up on this foreign sport if I was going to have any chance of turning a profit. I set about buying as many books on the sport as I could.

Braddock’s Complete Guide To Horse Racing was a good starting point. I then happened upon a Raceform Results Annual and started buying the weekly papers from Raceform and The Weekender and occasionally the daily Racing Post. It quickly became apparent that the winning time of the race was going to be important just as it is in athletics. Mordin On Time highlighted the importance of speed figures and compiling your own. I had Raceform’s speed figures so I didn’t need to worry about that. Or at least I thought I didn’t. I had some success using Raceform’s speed figures over the years but I sometimes felt a lack of confidence in certain speed figures when I was putting down the hard earned cash.

Around 2000 I decided to put together my own speed figures and sectional times. I worked on it as a hobby mainly over the next 10 years. I had been a subscriber to the Racing Channels and would record all the Replays to video cassettes at the time progressing onto hard drives eventually. I felt at the time that most of the speed figure publications would include races that were too slowly run or the pace was overly fast in their standard times leading to an unbalanced relationship in their standard times between distances.

Time is the one absolute truth of the game. Putting together a time related number on a horse’s performance will lead you to evaluate how fast or slow the conditions at the track on the day are. Forming a going allowance or track variant, as it is also known, will help you understand that a track record may have been achieved on a day when conditions were speeding up performances. It will also demonstrate to you that a lower speed figure horse can easily beat a higher speed figure horse, and they regularly do. Your going allowance will enable you to make the necessary adjustments to evaluate performances more accurately. In the next instalment I will give some examples of how one might go about putting a number on a performance. Till then enjoy your sport.