It’s been a little while since I wrote a blog post, and what better time to do so than on the day of the Grand National.
I’m going to use a combination of the Race Advisor’s tools to make my analysis of the race, beginning with Racing Dossier to narrow down the field.
With so many good runners in the Grand National, I’m going to remove any runner with odds higher than 33/1. That’s not because they can’t win, we know from history that they both can and do. However, because the chances of them winning is significantly lower than others, and we need a way to reduce the field down to a handful of runners to look in details, this is the approach I personally choose.
This takes the number of runners from 40 down to 15. Which begins to make our analysis much more viable.
Next I will remove any runner that has not had a good race in recent months. Of course, the Grand National is a target for a lot of horses, which means that instead of looking for a good race in the last two or three months, I will happily take that back over the last year.
As you can see in the screenshot below, of the fifteen runners we have left, there are three who haven’t had a good race in over a year.
This reduces the field down to just these twelve runners, more like a normal race:
Next I want to focus only on runners who have previously won a race over 3 miles or further. It’s very hard for a horse to win the Grand National if they haven’t won over a mile or further previous.
We can do this in Racing Dossier by looking at the history of the horses by clicking on the bars next to each horse’s name.
Here’s an example…
As you can see, we can sort a horse’s past races by distance, and this will allow us to see very quickly if a horse has won over 3 miles or further.
In the Racing Dossier we show all distances as yards, and three miles is 5280 yards. In the above screenshot you can see that Tiger Roll has won over a distance of three miles or further three times, the most recent being on the 14th March 2018.
Doing this brings us down to 11 runners.
Now we want to start narrowing down the field to the possible contenders in the race.
Looking at competitive form and speed we can see that Milansbar, Shantou Flyer and Anibale Flyer look to be the strongest contenders.
Looking at the pace in Pace Predictor, these are the horses that are likely to be near the front:
Usually this race is won by Leaders or Early Pressers, although a mid-pack horse can perform well. Of the three horses mentioned previously, Milansbar and Shantou Flyer are both Early Pressers and Anibale Flyer is a mid-pack type horse. This means all three have strong potential in pace, with a possible slight advantage to Milansbar and Shantou Flyer.
Looking at our Van Der Wheil ratings, we can see…
As you can see, Anibale Flyer is considered to be the strongest, followed by Blaklion. Shantou Flyer and Milansbar are further down in the middle of the ratings.
This increases our confidence in the performance from Anibale Flyer.
With the ground being heavy, it’s not going to be ideally suited to Anibale Flyer, whereas Milansbar and Blacklion should have no problem with it.
For me Anibale Flyer looks to be the strongest with Milansbar, Blacklion and Shantou Flyer being possible contenders.
If you want to get a complete guide to everything Grand National, check out our Grand National Compendium here.
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