Good quality weekend of racing with Randwick’s card much deeper than Flemington’s, despite the outstanding ALLIGATOR BLOOD v CATALYST race and the Lightning Stakes in Melbourne.
One of the points Vince made about the disappointing – to those who took the odds on! – performance of LIBERTINI when 4th in the Light Fingers at Randwick, was the data said the horse wasn’t wound up resuming this time in.
Last time first up same track/distance she produced a stunning +5.7 lengths above IVR benchmark performance (FLIT was 2nd see below) when they were trying to get an Everest slot and/or take on the boys in the Golden Rose.
Was there incentive with LIBERTINI this time in to be wound up?
Conversely FLIT resumed with the “blinkers equalled intent” truism and came to play with a best of day performance.
Tab Light Fingers Stakes (G2) at Royal Randwic (AUS)
T 1200m
Rating Category: Turf Sprint1st Flit 107
2nd Lyre 103
3rd Kiamichi 102 pic.twitter.com/GyEZ1JUJCT— Quote (@Quote987) February 15, 2020
Similarly in the Lightning, there’s no doubt NATURE STRIP, REDZEL and LOVING GABY were “there to win” as they say, but all had bigger goals ahead and for GYTRASH it was clearly chips in for the camp and they got the result.
Gytrash 😱😱😱
Nature Strip has a shocker. pic.twitter.com/CywArzTVJG
— 7HorseRacing 🐎 (@7horseracing) February 15, 2020
As did those who specked him from $26 to $21 and well done if you did.
Two points need to be underlined:
1/ As you can see above GYTRASH is a “duck” when we sizzled him after his June win watch here.
Rest assured looking at Vince’s data the straight played softer than the turning circle.
2/ GYTRASH isn’t “suddenly” a superstar. He ran a bit better than his previous best, but all of REDZEL, LOVING GABY and NATURE STRIP were below theirs.
So Damon Runyon?
One of his epic quotes were; The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that is the way to bet.
Old mate Damo would have had a bad fortnight!
After last week’s Orr when HEY DOC, SCALES OF JUSTICE and BEGOOD TOYA MOTHER were all below their best, the same this week with LIBERTINI, NATURE STRIP, REDZEL and LOVING GABY.
The swiftest and strongest has to be our starting point when trying to find a winner, but intent and soundness has to be factored into our thinking as much as race shapes and conditions on the day.
Have a great week.
Ralphy.
“Racetrack” Ralphy Horowitz provides independent form analysis via racetrackralphy.com.au. He uses Vince Accardi’s dailysectionals.com.au IVR benchmarking service and together they do the Year Round Carnival podcast review of the weekend’s main races every Monday”
