Godolphin

Timeform History

Timeform was founded by the late Phil Bull in 1948. Bull was one of the most successful betting men racing has ever seen and his famous grey beard was a familiar sight on British racecourses. He designed the Timeform publications to provide the information he considered vital to his own betting, and thousands began to share in his success.

Timeform's innovation was to look at racing horse by horse rather than race by race, a common enough concept now but revolutionary in 1948. Timeform Ratings quickly proved to be an invaluable guide, landing the One Thousand & Two Thousand Guineas double with My Babu 2/1 and Queen Pot 6/1 in the first year and the Derby & Oaks double with Nimbus 7/1 and Musidora 4/1 in 1949.

The winners have been flowing ever since, with Timeform ratings providing the Epsom classic double on another thirteen occasions. In 2001 Imagine 3/1 provided Timeform with its fifty-fifth Derby and Oaks winner in its two top-rated in fifty-four years. Later in the year Milan 13/8 became the twenty-seventh St Leger winner for Timeform.

These days the Timeform Organisation, based in Halifax, England, is under the direction of Jim McGrath, familiar to many followers of British racing in his role as a member of the Channel 4 Racing team. Timeform employs around eighty-five people to produce a range of publications that includes the highly collectable Racehorses annual series (complete sets often reach five-figure sums at auction), the renowned Timeform Black Book, a weekly A-Z of every horse to have run during the season to date, and the Timeform Perspective and Computer Timeform form-books.

Timeform Ratings

Timeform Ratings are an expression in pounds of the merit of the horse's form. The scale on the Flat runs from around 20 for the poorest animals to 140 or more for the very best performers. Horses without rateable form are rated '–'.

A simple way of looking at a race beforehand is to say that, other things being equal, the horse with the highest Timeform rating -- adjusted to the weights allocated in that particular event -- is the most likely winner. Indeed, getting on for half of all races on the Flat are won by one or other of Timeform's two highest-rated horses.

Obviously things aren't always that simple. No horse can be expected to run to its best form if it's running over an unsuitable trip or on ground on which shown itself to be ineffective.

Vital information like this can be found in the Timeform commentary, a short synopsis (updated after every start) which provides everything you need to know about each horse in a nutshell. It details the horse's best trip, the ground on which it is effective and other useful detail about its racing character.

Timeform Ratings aren't just renowned for their accuracy from a betting perspective. They also provide a means of comparing different generations, providing objective answers to questions like, "Who was the greatest Derby winner?" (The answer is Sea Bird II, by the way, who was awarded Timeform's highest-ever rating on the Flat of 145.)

This facility means that Timeform ratings are used extensively in the thoroughbred bloodstock industry, and you will often see ratings quoted in stallion advertisements.

Nowadays Timeform offers truly international coverage. The Racehorses annual includes ratings for the top horses in Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Scandinavia, North America, Japan, Hong Kong, Australia/NZ and the UAE, for which Timeform maintains a comprehensive handicap. A sign of the growing importance and popularity of Timeform on the international stage is the complete service for Hong Kong racing available from www.timeform.com.

This expertise makes Timeform uniquely well-placed to provide on this site an assessment of every start made by a horse managed by Godolphin, wherever it happens in the world.

Timeform also produces, for all racing in Great Britain, Computer Timefigures which are a measure of a horse's performance against the clock rather than other horses. Timeform Computer Timefigures are compiled on the same scale as Timeform Ratings and are directly comparable, so it's often worth noting performances where the timefigure is close to, or even better than, the rating achieved. However a poor timefigure may indicate no more than the race was slowly run. In these cases you'll often find confirmation of that in Timeform's comments about the race.