Your First Racecard

Where everything is, and what it tells you.

Theory: what the card is for

A racecard tells you three things: what today's race is, who is running, and what each runner has done before. Everything on the MWP card belongs to one of those.

This Intro follows one race through five chapters: the 2025 Queen Anne Stakes, the opening race of Royal Ascot, run over a mile on the straight course. Ten runners, most of them among the best milers in Europe, and one that had only ever raced in America. Each chapter reads another layer of the same card. In Chapter 5 you put a price on every runner, and only then do you see the result.

The race line

The top of the card describes the race: the track, the race name, the distance, the surface and the going. For the Queen Anne that is Ascot, 1610m, turf, good. MWP gives distances in metres; 1610m is a mile.

The class tells you the level. This is a Group 1, the top tier of racing. Groups 1, 2 and 3 (Grades in North America), with Listed races just below them, sit at the top of the sport. Below that, each country has its own handicaps and classes, and the labels don't translate one to one.

Two items on this line decide how you read the rest. The distance and the surface tell you which of each horse's earlier runs matter most. The going, the state of the ground, tells you whether today is fast, soft or somewhere between.

The runner line

Each horse has a line of basic facts: saddle cloth, draw, age, weight, jockey and trainer.

The saddle-cloth number is the one the horse wears and the commentator calls. The draw is the starting stall. In many countries the two numbers are different, so always name the horse when you bet.

Every runner in the Queen Anne carries 58 kg. That's because it isn't a handicap: this Group 1 is run at level weights, apart from a set allowance for fillies and mares, and there are none in this field. In a handicap, the better-rated horses carry more weight to narrow the gaps, so the weights spread out. You'll meet one in the last chapter.

The OR is the official rating: the local handicapper's mark, used to set weights in handicaps. It is not the MWP rating. Rosallion and Notable Speech have the highest OR in this race, 122.

The form

Under the runner line sits the form: one row per earlier run, newest first. The card shows the ten latest runs, and you can open the rest. Each row tells you when and where the horse ran, the distance, surface and going, where it finished and in how big a field, and the MWP rating for that run.

Hover a finishing position to see the whole result of that race. Hover the speech bubble to read the race comment, a short account of what happened to the horse during the run.

The MWP rating is the most important number on the card. It measures how well the horse ran that day, on a scale that is the same in every country. The next chapter is about how to read it.

Default and Expert

The card has two views. Default keeps it lean: the rating, class, official rating, going, jockey, weight, running style and a form trend. Expert opens up the rest, from career and season breakdowns to gate and track-speed columns and deeper trainer and sire statistics. Everything in this Intro works in Default.

On the historical cards in this course, some parts are switched off on purpose: statistics calculated after the race, and the live model's predictions. You see the form as it stood on the day.

What the card doesn't say

The card is evidence. It doesn't tell you who will win; it shows who has done what, where and when. Deciding what that means for today is your job, and the rest of the Intro is about doing it well.

Practical: read the card

Quiz: find your way around

Up next: the MWP rating, and how to tell a horse's level from its best day.