Research Corner – March/April AW Trainer Snippets

At the time of writing the UK weather is causing a good number of the jumps meetings to be called off so fingers crossed that things settle down as we head towards the greatest NH show on the planet, the Cheltenham Festival.

We have plenty of coverage for this year’s Festival elsewhere in this issue so for this month’s Trainer Snippets we will target the All Weather action which may be overshadowed somewhat with the proceedings at Prestbury Park, but a 10/1 winner (we hope) is the same wherever the event takes place.

To keep things refreshed and hopefully relevant we will base our research on the last 3 years, so, which trainers have historically performed well just prior to the new Flat Turf season which gets underway with the traditional curtain raiser at Doncaster featuring the Lincoln Handicap at the end of March.

We will shake things up a little by considering the historical data by Track and their respective surfaces starting with Southwell.

Southwell

The track has held the unique distinction of being the only one since its introduction in 1989 of racing on a fibresand surface which, generally speaking, is a relatively slower racing surface akin to soft and produces a lot of kickback which has a marmite effect in that some horses hate it whilst others thrive and become course specialists.

In mid December 2020, the owners of Southwell, Arena Racing, submitted a planning application to replace the fibresand surface at Southwell Racecourse with Tapeta which is used at Wolverhampton and Newcastle.

So, if the plan goes ahead work will begin in the Spring and the next few months will be the last to race on the Fibresand surface which may lead to a few last hurrah’s for the trainers and horses that have traditional done well at the Nottinghamshire based venue.

The following Table shows the performance of the leading trainers in terms of Strike Rate at Southwell during the past 3 years (Min 25 runners during period 2018-2020): –

Top of the pile in terms of winning Strike Rate is Richard Hughes which given he usually operates at around the 16% mark with his All Weather runners generally (last 3 years) the 1 in 3 on the Fibresand does stand out somewhat.

This is also confirmed when we look at the track by track performance of all his runners on All Weather surfaces during the last 3 years: –

The runners at Chelmsford look worthy of further consideration but clearly the above Table indicates that when Richard Hughes sends a runner to Southwell we should sit up and take notice, well at least whilst that can still happen in the remaining months.

System 18: Back the horses entered to run at Southwell on the Fibresand from the Richard Hughes yard during the months of March and April 2021.

Happy punting and stay safe.

Steve Carter

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For our Gold members this month Steve reviews other trainers of interest at Southwell and gives us the heads up on who to follow at Newcastle on the Tapeta. If you would like to get immediate access to these systems you can upgrade your account here.

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