Heading into a brave new world with the Pixies and the drones

Nirvana, the state of highest happiness, the condition of perfect quietude. Buddhists and Sikhs have sought it since time immemorial, theologians have been pondering its whereabouts for centuries, but as luck would have it, I’ve found it, on a light industrial estate in Raynes Park, right behind the new Next superstore and within sniffing distance of Pets at Home.

You can’t actually see it from the A298, but head into Racetech headquarters and wander the corridors for long enough and you’ll find an unprepossessing room stuffed to the gunwales with new-fangled machinery. Normally this would turn out to house something mundane, like the bank details of the entire Sunday Times Rich List, but on this occasion we’ve struck the motherlode.

Contained in a metal box that looks somewhere between a fridge-freezer and a time machine is the very essence of horseracing; in the most compact of technological nutshells we have video footage of every race run in the last two years, from every conceivable angle, and a lot more besides.