An introduction to Sectional Timing: Part 1

Bull sourced and analysed overall times, placing them into context and marrying them with form analysis to get ahead of the game. It was an edge that made him a rich man.

Decades on, overall time information is widely available and heavily analysed. Fast times – indicative of superior horses – are still valuable but are not missed in the way that they used to be. There is, however, an aspect of time analysis which is still overlooked by many, and that is sectional timing.

The usefulness of overall times is subject to a number of factors, not least the pace at which races have been run. Even Frankel would not have been able to run a fast overall time (compared to his immense ability) if he had ambled along for the first half of a race. But a Frankel who ran a race at an even tempo would very likely impress against the clock as well as against his rivals.

It is an incontrovertible fact, resulting from physical and bioenergetic laws, that a horse’s overall time will suffer if the manner in which it arrives at that overall time is inefficient. By going too fast early on, relative to its ability, a horse will slow down by more than it gained by going fast in the first place. Conversely, by going slowly early on, relative to its ability, a horse will be unable to recover all of the time it lost earlier through finishing fast.

In order to run fast for the duration of an event, a horse (or human, or dog, or whatever) needs to run efficiently compared to its own capabilities, in other words. Inefficiency will result in an overall time underselling the horse’s true ability. 

Traditionally, judgements about pace have been made visually. Experienced race readers are usually (but not always) able to judge whether a race has been truly- or falsely-run and to identify which horses have been advantaged or disadvantaged in general terms.

But sectional timing – whereby sections of races are timed and not just the whole – removes any doubt as to how fast a horse was running during a given part of the race and a great deal of the doubt as to the effect of this on the horse’s overall time.  

Sectional times, which are an accepted feature of racing in other major racing jurisdictions, have been available sparingly and sporadically in Britain over the years. TurfTrax provided them for the majority of all-weather races in 2006 to early-2008, have more recently produced them for the British Champions Series and started up again on the all-weather at Lingfield in February 2014. RaceTech are said to be a long way down the line of providing a sectional-timing service of its own.

But the absence of electronic sectional times in many instances arguably provides an opportunity and not just an obstacle. All racing in UK and Ireland is televised these days, on subscription channels if not on terrestrial television, and it is not that difficult a job to engineer individual sectionals for the majority of horses.

All you need to do is to establish a fixed sectional – subject to camerawork, and usually around 25% to 35% from the finish of a race – then record how long elapses between the leader passing this sectional and the leader (that is, the winner) passing the line, estimate the margins back for individual horses at the sectional (their margins back at the line are given by the result): from this, you can calculate the overall times and finishing sectionals of the horses themselves.

This information is easily enough obtained, and is valuable enough to boot, that Timeform has been taking manual sectionals in this fashion for many years and currently does so for all racing on the all-weather in Britain.

How to make greater sense of the figures will be explained in greater detail in the second part of this blog.