As the National Hunt season begins to wind down, Ayr Race Course has the honour of hosting the last of the “Nationals” over the testing race distance of 4 miles and in his post we use Proform to uncover one punting angle that you won’t find in the common or garden trends for this race. 

 

Head gear and why horses wear them.

The whole idea behind a horse wearing head gear is to get it to focus on what’s in front of them.

Head Gear is a general term to describe the various types of equipment worn by the horse such as Blinkers, Visors, Cheek Pieces, Hood, etc. and each type is designed to get the horse to run to the best of its ability.

So for example, blinkers restrict the field of view and makes the horse focus its attention forward or in the case of a tongue tie, helps with breathing during the race by stopping the horse’s tongue being caught in different parts of the bridle.

If any form of equipment is worn by the horse, the type of head gear is declared before the start of the race and highlighted in the race cards using symbols per the example below from our Race Guides.

• b = Blinkers
• v = Visor
• e = Eye Shields
• h = Hood
• p = Cheek Pieces
• t = Tongue Strap

If a horse has worn a particular set of headgear for the first time this is indicated by a number after the headgear letter.

e.g. p¹ means the horse is cheek prices for the first time.

Head Gear and the Scottish Grand National

Proform’s system builder offers unparalleled tools to help you uncovered profitable betting angles and strategies.

Using our horse race software we can “Profile” a race using previous results to determine which of the many factors are relevant and also highlight pointers to long term trends.

Below are the results from the system builder when analysing the record of horses wearing head gear in the Scottish Grand National from 1997 to 2014.

As you can see from the table above, horses wearing no form of equipment in the race have won on 16 occasions (from the last 18 renewals) a result which is 21% above normal expectation (A/E 1.21).

And if you backed each horse that didn’t wear head gear in the race, you would now be in profit to Betfair and Industry Starting Prices!

So, if we apply this factor in this year’s Scottish Grand National we can whittle the field down from 30 runners to a manageable shortlist of 15.

 

As always we suggest that you should not use the list to supplement your own selection method(s) however, if long terms stats are anything to go by, then the fact that horses wearing head gear perform worse than horses that don't provides one angle you can use to filter runners and riders in this year’s Scottish Grand National.

 

Do you want to see more?

Every day on our web site we provide a FREE stats and Race Guide.

As well as providing detailed horse racing statistics with profit pointers, our race card contains horse ratings for each contestant, unique pace information for every runner plus other time saving features to make pre-race analysis easy.

To download today’s Proform Race Guide for the Scottish Grand National, click on the link here