Of every race we have a result for, how many were won by a horse that led? Nationally it is 22.0%, across 6,819 races. It varies more by course than most people expect — and not for the reason most people give.
April 2026 to October 2026 · 12 of 89 courses have the 120+ races needed to say anything
It is not the surface
The usual explanation is that all-weather tracks suit horses that go forward. They do not, taken together: all-weather returns 22.2% against 21.9% on turf and jumps — the same number. The difference is track by track: Lingfield (AW) is the most front-biased course we hold, and Doncaster the least, at 31.5% against 13.0%.
A horse is counted as having led if the in-running comment says so — the official note on how it actually ran, written by someone with no interest in this analysis. “Led” means it won from the front, not that it was in front at any point.
Only 4 of these courses are genuinely different from the national rate. The bar shows the 95% interval: where it crosses the national line, the course is marked as no clear difference, however high or low it looks in the ranking. A course with 120 races is an estimate, not a fact, and ranking estimates without saying so is how this kind of table gets misused.
This is a raw rate, not a model. It does not adjust for field size, distance, class or going, so a course that stages a particular kind of race will carry that in its number. Treat it as a starting question, not a finding.
It is rebuilt as results come in, so the intervals narrow and more courses pass the 120-race threshold over time. Our own accuracy, measured →
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