We do not often blow our own trumpet, but every so often a single day's results make the argument better than we ever could. We genuinely believe RatingTheRaces produces the best ratings in the game, and Friday 24 July is as good a piece of evidence as we could ask for. The full card is now there for anyone to look through, so you do not have to take our word for it: open Friday's racecards, sort any race by RTR Rank, and see how the number-one-rated horse got on.
Because on Friday, it got on rather well. Across the day, our top-rated runner, the horse ranked RTR 1 on our figures, won 21 races. Twenty one. From eight meetings in Britain and Ireland, the horse our ratings picked out as the best in the race went in twenty one times.
Twenty one top-rated winners
And this was not a case of the favourites simply obliging in a string of two-runner races. Look at the quality and the spread of it. The grids below sit each winner's finishing Result next to our RTR Rank and the starting price (ISP), and these were not all short-priced favourites: Ipanema Queen went off 15/2 and Golden Temple 12/1.
- Diamond Rain won a fillies' Listed race at York at 1/2.
Diamond Rain, our top rated, winning the fillies' Listed race at York. - Alfred Wallace won a Listed race at Ascot at 3/1.
Alfred Wallace, our top rated, winning the Listed race at Ascot. - Coral Cove won a novice event at York
- Vaguely Royal won at York
- Imperial Cult, Not My Type and Swiped all won at Sandown
- Cawthorne Banker won at Uttoxeter
- Ipanema Queen won at Cork at 15/2.
Ipanema Queen, our top rated, winning at Cork. - Rusty Harkness and Golden Temple both won at Kilbeggan, Golden Temple at 12/1.
Golden Temple at 12/1, a price our figures rated at nearer 4/1, so the market let a genuine chance slip.
Listed races, novices, handicaps, sprints and staying races, on the Flat and over jumps, at big tracks and small, in two countries. That is the point. A ratings method is only worth anything if it works across the board, and on Friday ours pulled winners out of just about every kind of race there is.
Even the newcomers
Here is the hardest thing a set of ratings can do, and the one that really separates good figures from lazy ones: rating a horse that has never set foot on a racecourse. On Friday we did that too. Not My Type, a William Haggas newcomer making her racecourse debut, was our top rated in the Chasemore Farm EBF Maiden Fillies' Stakes at Sandown, and she won it at 4/1.
Anyone can rate a horse with a page of form to work from. Rating a debutante on its raw ability, before the market or the form book has any idea, is where a genuine ratings method earns its keep. Pro members can go a step further and see just how well this holds up: pull up William Haggas in ProStats and look at his record with our top-rated newcomers. That is the kind of edge you only get when the numbers are genuinely good.
And then there is the one that was not top rated
The 21 are the headline, but the run of the day for us was a horse the ratings did not have on top at all. Sorrengail was our nap of the day, and she won at Ascot.
Her story is exactly what the ratings, and our tracker, are for. She had finished only fourth last time out, in a red-hot maiden at Newmarket, and the bare result told you nothing. We watched that race and came away convinced she was at least the second best filly in it, and quite possibly the best. So we put her straight into our tracker with a simple note: she should be winning soon. On Friday she went to Ascot and did exactly that. That is the whole idea, finding the horse whose ability the form book has not caught up with yet, and being there when it delivers.
See for yourself
We are not going to pretend every day looks like Friday. Racing does not work that way, and anyone who tells you their ratings never have a quiet afternoon is not being straight with you. But days like this are not flukes either. They are what a genuinely good ratings method produces often enough to matter, and they are why we back ours the way we do.
The best part is that you can check it yourself. Every runner on every card carries our numbers, and you can sort any racecard by RTR Rank, RTR Score or Value Odds and follow along. Start with Friday's card, and if you want to understand how the figures are built, read our horse racing ratings page. Then judge for yourself whether we are right about them.