A - ZRunners Horse Racing Fixtures and Results

Changes to Timeform Horse Comments

Changes to how Timeform produce Horse Comments and our plans for Timeform

When Phil Bull founded Timeform in 1948 he had already been publishing Best Horses for a number of years and had refined what a potential Timeform customer was looking for; he first described this in the earliest versions of the Timeform Black Book:

To every racing fan, owner, trainer, breeder, jockey, bookmaker or bettor - it is of the utmost importance that they should "know" their horses : not merely how good they are, but what sort of horses they are.

Some of them stay, some of them sprint; some do best on soft going, some are apt to stick in the mud; some are honest, some are rogues; and so on and so forth. A keen appreciation of all these various individual characteristics in our racehorses is vital to an understanding of their performances.

With every horse it is necessary to know two things: first, its merit; and second, the conditions under which it is capable of displaying that merit.

The merit was, and still is, covered by the Timeform rating, while the conditions and characteristics were initially a very concise commentary but have grown over the years as more information has become available, including our race reporting and performance analysis.