Horse Racing Advice Article # 2

All Weather Racing Advice

The UK now hosts five all weather tracks with the recent opening of the latest addition in Essex. It may be fair to say that for most punters, all weather racing is a bit like Marmite; you either love it or you hate it.

For most avid punters, watching low grade horses running on the sand at Southwell may not prove to be as alluring as the admiring Royal Ascot, The Derby or the Cheltenham Gold Cup, but slowly and surely the all weather racing scene appears to be going from strength to strength.

The venues where you can currently watch all weather flat racing are:

The all weather season traditionally used to start in the autumn, just when the flat racing season is coming to an end. It would kick off normally around November-time, with the climax of the season being the Winter Derby at Lingfield in March. However nowadays, you can see all weather racing virtually all year round.

The standard of the all weather tracks in the UK is generally very good, although some have been scrutinized in the past for one reason and another. I remember when my son was at university in Wolverhampton, the old Dunstall Park racecourse was an absolute dump, plain and simple. A lot has changed since then, as it is no longer the run down venue that it was. Millions of pounds of investment and a great deal of though and planning has seen it rise like a phoenix from the flames.

One interesting fact is that of the five current all weather tracks, only one is a right-handed course; Kempton. The others, including the newly opened Great Leighs course are left-handed.

In addition to this, the courses at Wolverhampton and Southwell are what we’d call lozenge-shaped, while Lingfield is more triangular in shape. In fact, the sharp contours and short finishing straight at Lingfield often presents for an exciting finish.

Although all five courses come under the bracket of “all weather”, the surfaces do differ slightly from one another. The material used at both Wolverhampton and Lingfield is whats called “Polytrack”, which is basically a form of rubberized sand. This is supposed to help minimize the impact of something called ‘kickback’, which is the effect horses produce when thundering over loose-topped sand.

Southwell uses a different racing material called Fibersand, which creates a more demanding surface for the horse when compared with Polytrack. Racing here is not dissimilar to racing on soft or heavy ground but the kickback here is more pronounced than in other UK all-weather horse racing courses. This course is better for horses that can race ‘prominently’ and are ‘strong travelers’ as these are the horses that avoid kickback as much as possible.

An important point to note for any horse racing tips you might be considering is this; a horse that performs well at Wolverhampton or Lingfield will not necessarily do well at Southwell. Even though the distance may be the same, the difference in surface (and effectively the going) means that you need to be convinced that the horse will see out the trip.

Article Author: Cliff Thurston

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