Two familiar questions posed by racing fans are “where’s the pace, and where do you want to be drawn?”
And now racingtv.com is lending a helping hand solving these puzzles, with our new "Pace and Draw" feature on the racecards.
The new tab, produced in conjunction with RaceiQ, displays five pace categories, and Draw Advantage, which highlights colour-coded stall numbers alongside the lengths advantage for each stall.
These are generated for horses once they have had three runs. If Pace Maps are not available for at least 75% of runners in a race, none will be shown.
Alongside Pace Maps, we now also show RaceiQ Draw Advantage for all British and Irish Flat races.
Of course, nobody can ever be entirely certain where a horse may race. A change in tactics or an unusually fast/slow start can skew things. These are variables that only reveal themselves in live play.
But the draw advantage is based on 14 years of historical data, while the RaceiQ database has four years of horse data to call upon.
In total, RaceiQ has more than eight billion data points stored.
Below are a couple of examples of how Pace and Draw works:
Here's the Pace And Draw for the 2.45 at Musselburgh on Tuesday. Stay On Tab has, historically, a good draw in stall 7 (a 0.3 length advantage) and seems the likely early leader. The horses in stalls 1 and 2, both usually held up, have the worst of the draw. You can view Pace And Draw in different ways. For instance, here's the 4.15 with a change of setting. Leaders displayed at the top, hold up horses at the bottom.