Timefigure analysis of the Newmarket July Meeting

“When you are faced with the problem of writing you become aware of your limitations. You start thinking of the great past and the great men before you. Can you emulate them? Perhaps your ideas have already been described at length by somebody else”.

So said the novelist Hugh Walpole in an address he gave many years ago to an audience of aspiring writers. I very much doubt he had the constantly shifting sands of horse racing in mind when uttering those words, but the relentless churn of our sport nowadays and the numerous analytical approaches to it, of which this column is just one, rarely allows for the possibility anymore that, as someone else wrote, “quite frankly so much has already been said by so many that one hesitates to serve it all up again”.

I should say here and now that the performance that impressed me most last week in the twelve Group races run in Britain or Ireland came not at Newmarket but elsewhere, yet given that Headquarters staged the week’s feature meeting then I’ll keep that back until later and start off by rounding up the action from there.

Underfoot conditions were broadly consistent across the three days and so were those overhead too with little sign of the sun that is supposed to power the proposed controversial nearby giant solar farm that will sit uneasily alongside the famous Limekilns and Al Bahathri gallops.

Back in the day when the Flat racing program was far less bloated than it is nowadays and had a more rigid structure, the July meeting (and the two-year-old contests in particular) used to be a seasonal favourite of mine, but those treasured moments are long gone and sadly there wasn’t anything approaching the quality of City Of Troy’s 2023 Superlative Stakes win from the juveniles this year.

The first of the three Group races for two-year-olds was the July Stakes which a history book tells me is apparently the oldest regularly run race for two-year-olds having been founded in 1786 with the colts carrying 8st 2lb and fillies 8st ‘with the singular proviso that those by Eclipse and Highflyer were to carry 3lb extra – the progeny of those sires being, apparently, so much better than that of the others’.

Such an additional imposition might well be impossible to enforce upon the race these days as, remarkably, the 25 runnings this century have been won by the progeny of 24 different stallions (Mehmas is the only stallion to have sired two winners, Lusail in 2021 and Persian Force in 2022).

More to come from Whistlejacket?

He wasn’t responsible for any of the six runners this year, leaving No Nay Never to sire his first winner of the race courtesy of Whistlejacket having come close in 2023 when he was responsible for the runner-up Lake Forest.

Whistlejacket was all the rage in the betting to avenge his Norfolk Stakes defeat where he was sent off odds-on only to finish fourth to Shareholder, and ran out a comfortable winner. A winning timefigure of 100, elevated to 102 after taking the sectionals returned by Course Track into account, is below the 106 he recorded on soft ground at the Curragh in May, but he looked more comfortable at the six furlongs than he did at five at Ascot albeit allowed to dictate to a degree.

Strong on the climb to the line, he gave me the impression that he’ll be even better at seven furlongs as the female side of his pedigree (dam is by Bering and won over an extended ten furlongs) would suggest for all he’s a full-brother to the sprinter Little Big Bear.

All the same, his winning performance was only middling for the race, and whether (given he was the form pick anyway) it came anywhere near sufficient for the Racing Post to scream that the form of the Norfolk is red hot, as they did in Monday’s paper, is highly debateable given the third that day Arizona Blaze, has since been beaten much further in the Railway Stakes than he was in the Norfolk.

Certainly the form of neither the Coventry nor the Windsor Castle looks any better now than it did at the time with Coventry second Electrolyte and Windsor Castle winner Ain’t Nobody filling the last two places home behind Whistlejacket.

Substance to Dusk performance

In contrast, the Duchess of Cambridge looked one of the better recent renewals on time with the winner Arabian Dusk returning 104. The 11-runner field was the biggest since Roly Poly beat nine rivals in 2016 and, if anything, the timefigure I ended up settling upon on what was an unusually tricky meeting to rate is the bare minimum I was happy with, with the upper end of the potential being 109.

Arabian Dusk might have been a maiden going into the race, but her connections clearly knew what they had on their hands having started her off in the same Doncaster maiden as their subsequent Rockfel winner Carla’s Way (in the same ownership) in 2023 and she’d warmed up for this with a good third over course and distance in the Empress Stakes two weeks previously where she’d run a 94 timefigure in third behind subsequent Prix Robert-Papin third Celandine.

Her sectional times for both those races are something of a marked contrast; in the Empress she got to halfway in 51.4% of her overall time, ran the fourth furlong much faster than any of her rivals then ran the last two faster than all but the eventual fourth whereas here she got to halfway in a much lower proportion of her overall time – 50.6% – and left others to run the fourth and fifth furlongs fastest before she was claimed that mantle in the final furlong.

Runner-up Mountain Breeze and third-placed Heavens Gate upheld the form of the Albany, having finished fourth and third respectively in that contest, but neither Maw Lam nor Mighty Eriu could do the same for the Queen Mary finishing fifth and seventh respectively.

How good was the Superlative winner?

In the absence of a runner from the Aidan O’Brien yard in the bet365 Superlative Stakes – his intended starter The Parthenon was one of three withdrawn from the contest on the day – a race which has seen an upturn in its fortunes in recent years (besides City of Troy the subsequent Irish 2000 winner Native Trail won in 2021) ended up looking rather light on quality, to me at least.

An up-to-standard assessment would put this year’s winner Ancient Truth on 109 or so but his timefigure came at 100 and even the addition of sectional upgrades doesn’t take his overall timefigure to much above 102, so despite its recent history I’d be wary on the clock at least of overestimating this form and that the Karl Burke-trained Assertively could hang in there for so long after finishing second in a weak listed race at Deauville six days previously, looked a further red flag.

Ancient Truth might have been the only one of the four seven-furlong winners on the day to dip under 35 seconds for the last three furlongs, but he got to the three-furlong marker in his race over 2.14 seconds (getting on for 13 lengths) slower than Aalto did in the Bunbury Cup and 1.74 seconds slower than Asian Daze did in the fillies’ handicap. Hardly surprising he came home faster then.

The feature event on Superlative day was the My Pension Expert July Cup. The new sponsors might have been hoping for a sensational performance from the up-and-coming sprint star Inisherin for their debut involvement, but he hadn’t read the script, never looking to be particularly happy to me for all he ran the third furlong fastest of all and in the circumstances I thought he did well to plug on and run to a level only 8lb below his effort in the Commonwealth Cup.

As it was, the race ended up being fought out by a pair who’d last been seen in the Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee Stakes, third-placed that day Mill Stream reversing placings with second-home Swingalong to supplement his win earlier in the year in the in the Duke Of York where he recorded his best timefigure of 114.

This July Cup win doesn’t rank quite so high, just 106 (112 on overall timefigures after sectionals are incorporated) after a strong early pace led to a slow finish, and, if anything, the more prominently ridden runner-up Swingalong emerges from the race with the more credit. Vandeek’s final furlong finishing speed was even slower than Swingalong’s in a sign he should be ready to peak next time.

The other three Group races at Newmarket returned contrasting timefigures.

The opening Bahrain Trophy was a steadily-run affair in which the winner Ancient Wisdom dictated in a very modest 64 timefigure. A pedestrian affair such as this shouldn’t be of much use to such a relentless galloper, so the fact he was pulling away at the end would appear to me to point more to the limitations of the opposition than anything else.

Indeed, his last 24.93 last two furlongs was just 0.01 second faster than Giavellotto managed in the far more strongly-run Princess Of Wales’s Stakes (timefigure 117, could have been a bit higher) later in the card and he’s clearly an improved performer since turning five and teaming up with Oisin Murphy. Form pick Porta Fortuna won the Falmouth with her best performance yet on the clock, 111, which is towards the upper end of the scale this century in a race that often descends into a tactical battle.

The performance of the week

Anyway, back to the start and with all due respect to the winners mentioned above, the most impressive winner I saw last week came not in Britain but in Ireland where Jancis won the Group Three Brownstown Stakes over seven furlongs at Leopardstown.

A surprise 40/1 winner on her debut last month at the same track, where she scored in a 92 timefigure, was the only one to make ground from the back and ran the last two furlongs around 1.7 seconds (eight lengths faster) than the runner-up, she was again settled out the back in a very differently-run Brownstown yet created an even bigger impression.

A final two-furlong burst of 22.68 seconds was 1.13 seconds faster than the runner-up Bluedrum, third in a Listed race on her previous start, managed and translates by my calculations into an 15lb bigger upgrade using that metric alone than the runner-up rather than the 6lb allowed by traditional form calculations.

That suggests she’s a 115 or so filly and if you haven’t seen a video of the race, I suggest you take a look below now.

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