Irish Race Cards and Irish Speed Ratings

We will be adding Irish race cards and Irish speed ratings to Inform Racing for the first time on October 21st 2024.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, long term subscriber and proud Irishman Martin, has been compiling the speed ratings for me since June 1st this year and we have all of the past form data too, so I am happy to announce we are now going to go full Irish as well as full GB, as we have already been since 2023.

A very brief overview

Not too much to say, as the Irish cards will continue on in the same way that the GB cards have done, apart from, we will be highlighting any Irish ratings for you on the GB cards and vice versa.

Irish cards example

You can click any image to enlarge it if needed.

On the card above from Saturday at Limerick, the green bar at the top of the race card header denotes an Irish race.

You can also see the days since run number for the third most recent race for World Of Fortunes is highlighted in (GB) blue. This means that this race was run in Great Britain. 

As I said earlier, we have only been calculating the Irish ratings since June 1st, so any races before then will not have a rating. Currently this goes back about 140 days or so.

Of course more will be added in the weeks, months and years ahead and you can hide any 1 ratings in the race card settings if you wish to.

GB cards example

So the GB cards have a blue bar at the top and as you can see from this Ascot race yesterday, any ratings on a GB race card that occurred in Ireland, will be highlighted by the days since run number in green.

​With the Irish courses being well known for not exactly having very reliable race distances, it hasn’t been easy for Martin to compute all of the changing data that has been occurring.

However, in time we will see just how accurate these are but of course I have every faith in Martins calculations and want to thank him sincerely for taking on what was initially a mammoth task, regarding our new standard times for these courses plus everything else that goes into manually calculating these ratings each day.

I am sure a few of you want me to thank Martin as well and if you want to put anything in the comments at the bottom, please feel free to do so.

So a new era begins

It should have happened a long time ago so I won’t be getting too excited this end tonight, I just hope these all work out well going forward for users.

And now we will start concentrating on adding the new data from the Racing Post API, plus other stuff we have in the pipeline for the race cards and the system builder in the main, as well as the Betting Tissue Tool and In Running Trading Tool.

Just one thing to note; the Irish data will not be added to the system builder until we have completed the above, so that will remain GB results and data only for the time being.