THE curtain may have been drawn on the significant events in the flat racing calendar in this part of the world, but there is still a fair bit taking place on the other side of the world.

The latest horse to be trumpeted as “The Best In The World” by its supporters was Almond Eye, winner of the Japan Cup at odds-on early on Sunday our time.

In beating Kiseki by a length and three quarters, she gets a 126 rating from Timeform, which is the equivalent of a few lengths behind the likes of Winx and Enable at their 134 best.

One especially impressive aspect of the Japan Cup was the time, a reported world record for 2,400 metres at 2m 20.6s.

A small word of caution about such comparisons is that Japanese timing starts around 1.0s after the gates open, so misses some of that initial acceleration, but is indeed for the full distance.

There are a few promising two-year-olds coming out of the woodwork closer to home, but perhaps none more so than Red Impression, who broke the six-furlong track record at Lingfield last Saturday when landing a novice stakes at odds on by six lengths.

The overall time is worth a 104 figure with me – conditions were fast but not so ridiculously so – which gets upgraded to 109 on the back of a 22.3s last-two-furlong sectional according to Total Performance Data.

A listed race should be well within Red Impression’s scope, but I suspect connections will be dreaming bigger than that for this quite speedily-bred daughter of Dark Angel.

Other useful all-weather timefigures came from Equitant (102) at Dundalk and Flaming Spear (109) at Kempton, while the Godolphin debutant Zakouski ran only a 69 overall timefigure on the latter course but put in some sharp late splits to defeat the much-vaunted Headman and can be rated at least 97 on sectionals.