A NEW year brought some tricky conditions under which to assess performances by time. When it rains persistently, but not necessarily consistently, as happened at Cheltenham on New Year’s Day, it can be quite a job to establish which times are genuinely slow and which are simply down to deteriorating conditions.

This is another area in which sectionals can assist, for sectionals represent the proportion of the overall time of a race that was spent in each section, and that proportion should not change by much even when conditions mean that the overall times do.