If you are an experienced student of race form analysis you will quickly find your own way to use our Early Speed and Total Speed ratings, and the other tools we offer. If you are new to racing or just sick of losing and ready to try something new that works, we offer this step-by-step approach:

Lets begin

This should always be the starting point for your analysis of the past runs of horses entered for a coming race - you need to know how fast or how slow the leaders will go in the early stages of the race.

The reason this is important is that each horse has a favoured "style" of racing, and different levels of early speed favour different racing styles. For example, a horse that likes to lead will be helped if the early speed will be slow and he is unlikely to be seriously challenged for the lead. But the same horse will be at a serious disadvantage if several faster horses compete with him for the lead and push him faster than he can handle. At the other extreme, a horse that runs on late from the back will be helped if the Early Speed is so fast the on-pace horses exhaust each other before the home straight. Knowing how fast the early speed will be tells us what style of horse will be favoured.

Here is an easy way to forecast the early speed using RacingHK data:

• On the Enhanced Form guide, open the "Filter" drop-down menu and select "Early Pace Only". This strips the horse past performances to show only the runs where horses led or raced within 1.5 lengths of the lead in one or more early sections. (You can return to the full past performance record later.)
• The horses identified by this filter will fall into two groups, those that regularly lead (group 1) and those that are usually close up but not necessarily leading (group 2).
• If there is more than one regular leader, average the early-speed ratings for the two fastest to get a reliable indicator of the tempo for the coming race.
• If there is only one regular leader, set the tempo at two points faster than the Early Speed rating of the fastest horse from group 2, the on-pace runners. In other words, we expect the leader to go only as fast as he has to, i.e. about 1.5L ahead of the best on-pace runner.
• If there is no regular leader, set the likely tempo at two points LESS than the Early Speed rating of the fastest group 2 horse.

Further thoughts

Be on the lookout for random factors that can influence the early speed - such as a large number of horses that race on-pace, or horses that "must" lead and whose history shows they will fight hard to do so even when outpaced. Both these scenarios put extra pressure on the leaders.

Also, do not be misled by a horse that usually races off the pace but who suddenly has a race where he is sent up to contest the lead at a fast pace before dropping out in the straight. Unless his finish position improved significantly after this change in tactics, he is unlikely to repeat those tactics and it is best to leave him out of early-speed calculations. In general, look at the overall picture of a horse's racing style, rather than one instance, even if it is his most recent race.