About
PaceMap is a race shape analysis tool for British and Irish horse racing, powered by an engine called ANCHOR. The analysis is published the evening before racing, every race, every meeting.
PaceMap publishes context, not advice. The engine reads each race, classifies running styles, models the likely shape, weighs the form against today's conditions, and produces a private rating for every horse alongside a measure of how confident it is in that rating.
What it does not do is turn that analysis into a selection. There is no tipping line, no nap of the day, no recommended stake. That is a choice, not an oversight. The job of the engine is to be honest about what it knows and transparent about what it does not. The job of the reader is to decide what to do with the analysis.
The most useful thing a tool like this can be is rigorous and unbiased. The moment it starts producing selections, it stops being either.
PaceMap is built and run by Andy Jobber, based in Cheshire. Mathematics graduate from the University of Liverpool, sixteen years working in data and digital — most of it spent finding signal in noisy commercial data for clients who needed decisions made from it.
I've followed horse racing since 2007. The question that drew me to it is the same one every serious follower ends up asking — is there a systematic way to get ahead of what is about to happen, rather than explaining it after the fact. For years I read form by hand. Eventually I started building tools to do the parts that did not need a human.
ANCHOR is what came out of that. It is a structured method for reading a race the way a sharp form student would, but at the scale a full afternoon of racing actually requires — every comment on every recent run for every runner, every preference axis, every plausible race shape, dampened by the confidence the evidence supports.
The engine took a long time to build and test. The goal was always the same. A repeatable, data-driven way to understand race shape before the off — not a gut feel dressed up in numbers.
Next
The six analytical layers of the engine — anchored ratings, parsed form, preference, pace shape, dampening and structural factors — are explained in full at The Method. Each layer has a dedicated article describing what it does, why it matters and where the engine diverges from how a single-number rating would handle the same horse.
Read The Method →