Michael Wilding of Race Advisor has been a big help to The Racing Horse over the years and is one of the very few suppliers of racing information we take seriously. He said last month: "There are very few providers of horse racing data, and even less sources of the original data. Most of the big sites simply buy the data and get it fed into their systems. Some of them may have a few checks, but it takes a lot of time to clean data, and time costs money. So most of them don’t bother, because most people never pick it up, and the big horse racing sites make their money from commissions off bookmakers (which is morally dubious at best)."

We fully understand and acknowledge these comments, it is something we have battled with for years. We have little choice but to lean on the figures of Racing Post, Timeform and At The Races, all of which we pay for, but we know there are times our sources are either late/slow in updating, or sometimes totally wrong! Worst still, there is nothing we can do about it!

The most recent (and blatant) example are the Southwell AW figures and it is something we need to talk about!

Most of us are aware that form and results on the Southwell Fibresand have no comparability to those races on a Tapeta surface. Why, because the Fibresand surface equates to heavy ground, whilst racing on the Tapeta surface equates to fast ground. As we go to post both Racing Post and Timeform have lumped/combined the form of the horses and the statistics of the trainers into one classification. This negligence is irresponsible and we are not sure how this has been allowed to happen?

Horses form on different ground conditions is the single biggest variation in its history, our decision making processes must acknowledge this fact. Every horse ever born has a penchant/predisposition for a certain ground/surface, the onus is always on the bettor to know what this is, or failing that to make a help or hinder judgement.

Apart from the horses form history being mis-classified, the trainer performance figures at Southwell become worthless. For example, Michael Appleby trains very close to this racecourse and over the years built a fabulous relationship with it. His figures on the Fibresand show 209 winners from 1393 runners for 15% and 4% above his national average. The figures prove he is proficient at placing horses to win on this surface. Since its switch to Tapeta he has recorded 0-28 for 0%. Racing Post statistics show 209-1421 for 15% which is 100% incorrect and one assumes these figures will be allowed to distort more after today's racing and in the future!

Michael talks about the need for clean data and boy is he right!

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