For this article, I am revisiting the subject that essentially got me interested in racing 15 or so years ago - draw bias. As we are in the middle of the all weather season it seems prudent to concentrate on the all weather courses and the focus is the sprint trips of 5 and 6 furlongs. For this piece I am looking at my two favourite all weather tracks - Kempton and Southwell.

As usual with type of research, I am going to concentrate on races of 10 runners or more. The 10 runner figure has always been the cut off point for my draw bias research as you need a reasonable number of runners in order for any biases to note-worthy.

I have split the draw positions into three – the top ‘third’, the middle ‘third’ and the bottom ‘third’. Hence, in a standard 12 runner contest draws 1 to 4 will be in the bottom ‘third’, 5 to 8 in the middle ‘third’ and 9 to 12 in the top ‘third’. I am also going to focus on handicaps as traditionally any draw bias tends to be stronger and more reliable in handicap races. The reason for this is that handicaps are races that theoretically give each horse the same percentage chance of winning. Better horses are penalised by having to carry more weight in an attempt to slow them down. In practice it is does not quite work like that, but handicaps are still by far the most reliable type of race for this type of study.