Every horse you follow has a race it wants: the right ground, the right trip, the right kind of track. Most of us carry that in our heads, or in a notebook. Ideal Race lets you write it down once, on the horse's profile, and RaceMetrics checks every card the horse runs on against it.

Setting it up

Open the horse's profile and go to My Notes. Under each note there is an Ideal race box. Click Set the ideal race.

RaceMetrics reads the horse's record and suggests the conditions it has won under, each with the runs behind it, for example "Good: 3 wins from 4". A small sample is marked as one. Nothing goes in unless you add it, and you can add anything else from the list: going, trip, course, track type, direction, level of race, mark, days since its last run, runners, draw, pace, class move and headgear.

Each condition is a Must or a Nice. A must-have has to be right; a nice-to-have helps. You can keep one ideal race for each My Notes tab (General, Flat Turf & NHF, Flat AW, Hurdle and Chase), so a dual-purpose horse can want soft ground over hurdles and fast ground on the Flat.

The verdict

  • Suits today: every must-have met, and no more than one nice-to-have missed.
  • Part fit: one must-have missed, or two or more nice-to-haves missed.
  • Against it today: two or more must-haves missed. If it is beaten, that run can be forgiven.

Something that cannot be known yet, such as the draw before it is made, shows a question mark and is never held against the horse.

Where you see it

On My Card, every horse you have set up gets a line under it with its verdict. Show opens the check condition by condition: what you asked for, what today's race offers, and the horse's own record on it. The same verdicts show as pills on Runners A to Z, in the pencil hover on the dashboard's race tiles, and in the 9pm email of your noted horses running tomorrow.

It is a guide to the race, not a tip: it tells you whether today's conditions are the ones you said suit the horse, not whether it will win.

Ideal Race is part of RaceMetrics Enterprise and above. The full guide is in the Help Centre.