Simon Rowlands: Sectional timing and Frankel - a marriage made in Heaven

Champions Day / Simon Rowlands / 10 October 2011 / Leave a Comment

Hand-clocking won't be necessary at Ascot on Champion's Day.

"One of the welcome initiatives of the brave, new, British end-of-season showpiece will be sectional timing for each horse in each race."

Ascot's QIPCO British Champions Day sees the return of not just Frankel but of sectional timing to a British racecourse. Simon Rowlands sees great potential in this exciting development.

The scientific community got in quite a tizzy the other week when experiments seemed to show that neutrinos could exceed the speed of light, the "universal speed limit" previously thought to be inviolable.

If proved true - and there is more than a little scepticism on this front - then some of the fundamental premises of physics will have to be rethought.

In a way, horseracing has a neutrino "problem" of its own.

Horses simply are not meant to run as fast, for as long, as the horse called Frankel seems capable of doing. And it could be argued that he has already changed, in a fundamental way, how we look at racehorse performances.

Frankel wins mile races by running like a top-notch sprinter for much of the way. He once, famously, outspeeded a train in a morning gallop, though that may well say more about the heel-dragging nature of the Cambridge to Newmarket public service than about Frankel's superequine qualities.

The problem in both cases is measurement. There is a good chance that measurement has gone awry, somewhere, where the neutrino is concerned, while the right kind of measurement simply has not yet been applied to Frankel.

If ever there was a horse whose existence cried out for sectional timing it is Frankel. He gets from A to Z very quickly, that we know already. But the tantalising possibility is that he is even more impressive in getting from A to S, from F to Z or from F to S.

In the absence of electronic sectionals, Frankel was estimated by a number of hand-clockers as running several back-to-back furlongs of around 11 seconds on his way to winning the 2000 Guineas at Newmarket in April by a margin that was even wider at halfway than it was at the line.

Similarly, he lobbed along in the lead of the Sussex Stakes before destroying his rivals with a burst of speed from halfway that is usually seen only in the very top sprints.

We will never know just how fast Frankel was travelling mid-race in either the Guineas or the Sussex. But, fortunately, there will be no such ignorance after he runs in the Queen Elizabeth II Stakes on QIPCO British Champions Day at Ascot on October 15.

One of the welcome initiatives of the brave, new, British end-of-season showpiece will be sectional timing for each horse in each race.

The presence of a transponder in each horse's saddle will triangulate their position many times a furlong, so that the time for each furlong, and even the precise distance covered for each sectional, can be deduced.

This is not the first time that sectional timing has been used on British racecourses. TurfTrax, the company responsible for the sectional technology on QIPCO British Champions Day, returned figures from a selection of tracks for several years before funding issues brought that to an end in 2008.

As a result, we already have a pretty good idea of how horses tend to run races under various circumstances.

They begin slowly - an inevitable consequence of a standing start - and tend to run fastest just before the end of a race, slowing down in the final furlong.

At a course like Ascot, the speed of the final three furlongs of a race should not, in most cases, be far away from the average speed of the race overall. But those final three furlongs are likely to be covered in successively slower times for each furlong.

This blog will, next week, shed more light on what may happen - from a sectional point of view and in terms of hard facts and figures - at Ascot's big race day.

In the meantime, the anticipation of the occasion has been enhanced by not only Frankel's confirmed presence but by the promised opportunity for the public to measure his considerable ability like never before.

And you don't have to be a sectional-timing nut to find that prospect more than a little exciting.