Mayson winning the July Cup on heavy ground at Newmarket

  PICTURE: Martin Lynch (racingpost.com/photos)  

Hard to predict Mayson's form on better ground

WORLD CLASS: an analysis of the international scene according to Racing Post Ratings

BASTILLE DAY, the middle of July, and the Grand Prix de Paris was run on soft. Newmarket's July meeting and the feature sprint of the summer - the July Cup - was run in a bog.

It's fair to say summer 2012 will be remembered for the poor weather.

You can consider many different mediums that can make horses perform entirely at odds to their 'normal' standard and with all this rain about we have the chance to look at soft or heavy ground.

Horses all have preferences. Some like soft ground, some go right-handed better than left, some need blinkers to show their best form and some need a recent run.

With these variables in their favour they can run to their best and without them their form drops off to some degree.

Most of the time soft gro und doesn't inconvenience most horses. Unless a horse has a strong aversion to it, everyday soft ground slows them all down fairly evenly.

But then you get extreme cases of heavy ground where the form book appears to go completely out the window.

Just as with Monterosso, Krypton Factor, and African Story on the Tapeta all-weather track at Meydan in March, Mayson was a convincing winner at Newmarket on Saturda y.

Run the July Cup ten times and he would have won all of them on that surface on that day, but, as with the Meydan specialists above, move the race elsewhere and the result might have been different.

In Mayson's case the result is even more peculiar, since trainer Richard Fahey reported that he didn't handle the "bottomless" ground at Newcastle, but he somehow managed to plough through the heavy ground at Newmarket when nothing else could.

We don't know whether Mayson will reproduce this fine front-running effort on a better surface. He clearly goes well in the mud but he hasn't had the opportunity to show what the new improved Mayson of 2012 can do on good ground.

He may run just as well. What will change when he encounters good ground, however, is that his rivals from Saturday will not be so radically inconvenienced.

When it comes to rating the form there are some big questions to answer, such as: if A beats B on turf, then B beats A on Tapeta, which performance should be rated higher?

If the answer is whichever is quickest, where does that leave soft-ground form which is inevitably slower? If the overall aim of racing is to find the quickest horses, then shouldn't soft-ground form be rated inferior to fast?

Showing form on soft is more a case of which horse is slowed down least by the surface. This may prove the winner is more versatile than the others, but no horse actually improves on soft ground.

A case could be made, by those who praise the form of fast-ground turf, that you would not want a horse's soft-ground rating to exceed his fast-ground rating.

This would be a reasonable request, since no horse actually runs faster on soft ground, but in practice this does not happen.

The reason is that all soft-ground form would then be demoted. Soft-ground Group 1s would never rate up with fast-ground Group 1s. We would consider the form as the only form that exists and judge everything against fast-ground turf form.

In reality a state of balance has to enter the equation. Horses regularly run on soft ground and a soft-ground event is still a legitimate horse race, so it is rated, effectively, on another axis: the soft-ground axis.

It is rated on the same scale as fast-ground racing. That means a Group 1 winner on soft will receive a similar rating to a similar Group 1 winner on fast, and likewise down the ability spectrum.

There may be an argument for only considering fast-ground form as an absolute measure of a horse's speed, and therefore perhaps it's ability to breed fast stock, but in terms of achievement, soft-ground form is legitimate.

As Mayson showed on Saturday and Camelot showed at the Curragh a couple of weeks ago, you can win big prizes if you handle heavy ground and the ability to run on it is an asset - particularly this year.

Tapeta races are also rated on the same scale as fast turf, since some horses can perform equally well on both. It is these crossover horses, like Rocket Man, who legitimise the small pool of Meydan form by tying it up with the turf scale.

There are wider issues regarding the scales races are rated on. If, for instance, most horses are not bred for a given surface, or a majority of horses don't handle that surface, or if there are fewer races or there are less advocates of it, then there could be calls to demote form on certain surfaces; consider it less worthy.

But it doesn't matter which surface is more popular in the present day because with crossover horses we will always be able to directly tie the form together.

Fast turf and dirt may not always be the tracks of choice as they are today. The future may bring us a fantasy world, or an urban sprawl where grass refuses to grow.

The current system is future-proof. Bring rains, bring all-weather tracks, bring swimming races, treacle races, six-legged races. We'll put them all on the same scale, but consider them, where necessary, as different axes of the same great game.

Mayson posted an RPR of 123 for his five-length win at Newmarket on Saturday.

Most of his rivals were unproven on testing ground and most didn't handle it, but fifth-placed Hawkeyethenoo offers some guide to the result, running up to his best soft-ground form.

The winner is now three from three at Newmarket and appears to have a penchant for mud, so it is hard to say how much his form will drop off when he runs under different conditions. If it keeps raining he'd look a reasonable favourite for the Sprint Cup at Haydock.

Frankel's generation continue to go well. Mayson is a four-year-old, as were the winners of Thursday and Friday's feature races at Newmarket, Fiorente and Giofra.

Back in the three-year-old division the search for a deputy to Camelot continues after stablemate Imperial Monarch landed the Grand Prix de Paris on Saturday.

It was a tight finish, as is the custom with this crop, and the winner and second both posted RPRs of 118, while the third and fourth ran to marks of 117.

Main Sequence had a troubled run and finished fourth. It is hard to be confident he would have won but he might have gone very close.

It was clearly a boost for Camelot that his stablemate won and the horse he hammered in the Derby almost won, but where oh where is that elusive number two?

TOP OF THE CLASS: Mayson 123 Richard Fahey (GB) (July Cup, Newmarket, 6f, July 14)

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