Wolverhampton roles out the Tapeta

I'm sure Wolves first meeting on Tapeta is tomorrow , lifted this blog from Timeform

In his latest blog Simon Rowlands assesses the potential impact of the synthetic racing surface which will be making its UK debut soon...

British racing will register another first when Arena Racing Company-owned Wolverhampton racecourse reopens on Monday 11 August. The course has been shut for business since 29 April while the old Polytrack surface was removed and replaced with TapetaTM.

Tapeta has been installed in other racing jurisdictions, notably at Meydan in the United Arab Emirates, but not previously in Britain. The surface will, therefore, be something of an unknown to many of the owners, trainers, jockeys and punters looking to get involved. What can they expect?

The response from jockeys at a trial day at the course at the beginning of August was notably favourable. Royston Ffrench went as far as to say “It is an excellent surface. It has fulfilled all expectations”, while Richard Kingscote commented on the lack of kickback, concluding “It needed doing, and fortunately the owners have invested in a nice new surface, and it will do us well”.

Punters can be excused for being less sure of what to expect. But, as always in betting, uncertainty can provide opportunities as well as obstacles.

Both the company which produces Tapeta – Tapeta Footings Inc – and Wolverhampton’s Clerk of The Course – Fergus Cameron – were at pains to emphasise that the speed of the surface is closely associated with maintenance.

That surface speed will affect things like average margins between horses, general effectiveness of tactics, and times taken to get from A to B of course (race distances will remain as they had been for Polytrack).

Horseracing legend Michael Dickinson, who helped to design Tapeta, elaborated: “The firmness of the track is dictated by the Clerk of The Course and the tractor drivers. They can make it firm or very soft. Tapeta is a compliant material and will do what we ask of it”.

Cameron stated: “The more the track is worked, the more established the base pad will become. This determines the speed more than the cushion”, and added that the expectation of working the track once on an eight-race card would be reviewed as a result of the switch in surfaces.

Nonetheless, it is interesting, and may well prove informative, to consider how Tapeta has performed elsewhere already.

As a test case, I looked at racing at Golden Gate Fields in California, where races take place on both Tapeta and turf: we know plenty from first-hand experience about how the latter affects margins, tactics and times, after all.

After normalising for race distance and for field size (which has a major effect on average margins), the results showed that Tapeta strung horses out by about 40% more than turf at the track, based on 274 turf races and 1011 Tapeta races in 2013.

However, this could be down to a lack of competiveness in races run on Tapeta compared to turf. Interestingly, these wider margins were not reflected in slower overall times; if anything, the opposite.

They were also not reflected in a sizeable difference in how pace-forcers fared on Tapeta compared to turf. Horses which were ahead of more than 75% of their rivals in the combined first two Points of Call at Golden Gate Fields won slightly more often compared to chance on turf than on Tapeta.

There was no evidence that the kind of “front-runner friendly” results seen in general on dirt and fibresand (on both of which surfaces races tend to be attritional and on which kickback can be a major issue) were replicated on Tapeta.

Then again, as Dickinson pointed out, the Tapeta installed at Wolverhampton is a “version 10” of the Tapeta formula, and he expects its effects to vary from those to be seen at Golden Gate Fields.

A pound of realisation will be worth a stone of speculation where Tapeta and Wolverhampton is concerned, but waiting for incontrovertible proof can be a lengthy, and sometimes costly, business.

My best guess is that the surface will ride slower than Polytrack to begin with – this tends to happen with newly-laid surfaces as they bed in anyway and tallies with Cameron’s remarks above – resulting in wider margins, but that the surface will play pretty fair overall. However, this “prior” may have to be revised markedly once things get under way.

There could be rich pickings for those punters who react appropriately and in a timely manner. Wolverhampton represents a Brave New World of opportunity for a punter from 11 August on: you just need to be brave enough, and clued-up enough, to tackle it.