When Timeform announced on 13th July 2026 that the printed race card would be discontinued "in the coming months," and that Horses to Follow would migrate to a Race Passes-only digital product, the industry reaction was muted — a nostalgic sigh rather than a shock. That reaction is itself the story, and it's also slightly misleading about where this history actually begins. This isn't Timeform's first retreat from print, or even its second. It's the last stage of a withdrawal that has been running, in clearly dated increments, for more than thirty years — one that has cost the company its printing press, its annual library, its independence, and, one by one, the people who gave its ratings a face.

Halifax, 1948: rigour as a business model

Timeform was built on an idea that was genuinely radical for its time: that a horse's merit could be expressed, with mathematical discipline, as a rating in pounds. Phil Bull, a Yorkshire mathematician and formidably successful professional gambler, teamed up with Dick Whitford — Bull supplying the time-based analysis, Whitford the form-based judgement — and the two approaches were fused into a private handicapping system published through their own house, Portway Press, from 1948 onwards. Within a generation, Timeform's ratings, symbols and flags had become something close to the industry's shared language: not an official measure, but the de facto one, deferred to by professionals in a way the official handicap rarely was.

Crucially, even at the height of its authority, the printed Timeform race card was never the primary document at the track. As Timeform's own closure notice acknowledges, it was launched as an alternative to the official racecourse card — the analytical upgrade for the serious student of form, sold alongside, not instead of, the card racecourses already provided. That distinction matters for understanding what's now been lost: not the racegoer's basic information source, but a premium layer of interpretation that fewer people, over the decades, were evidently willing to pay for.

1985 and the first real challenger

The pivot point is easy to date. The Racing Post launched in 1985 and rapidly established itself as Britain's dominant racing daily, embedding its past-performance pages — and eventually its own Racing Post Ratings (RPR) — into betting shops up and down the country. RPR wasn't just a rival opinion; it was explicitly built to sit alongside, and in some syndicated contexts to replace, Timeform's own ratings in the publications that carried them. For the first time, punters had a credible, cheaper, more visible alternative sourced from the paper they were reading every day anyway, rather than a specialist publication they had to seek out separately.

It's a small detail, but a telling one: the Timeform Chase, run at Haydock since 1981, carried Timeform's sponsorship only until 1992, before passing to other backers. Barely a decade after the race was inaugurated, and almost exactly as the Racing Post was consolidating its position, Timeform's appetite for buying racecourse visibility was already receding. The retreat from print didn't start in the 2020s. It started, in small ways, in the early 1990s.

The sale of the family silver — and what came with it

Bull died in 1989, and although chairman Reg Griffin kept the company run "largely as a highly successful family firm" — Griffin wasn't related to Bull, but the description reflects how independently and old-fashionedly Timeform still operated — that independence had a shelf life. Portway Press had already rebuffed one takeover approach, reportedly worth around £10 million, some five years before it finally agreed terms with a suitor.

The deal that stuck was announced and completed within days of each other at the end of November 2006: Betfair, then the betting industry's fastest-growing exchange, bought Portway Press Ltd outright for a reported £15 million. Both sides framed it publicly as a marriage of like minds rather than a hostile absorption. Betfair's chief executive David Yu called the acquisition a "perfect partnership," on the logic that an exchange which profits from turnover, rather than from taking the other side of a bet, had every incentive to want its punters — and Timeform's readers — finding winners. Griffin, for his part, welcomed a buyer he said shared Timeform's own principles of integrity and trust. Betfair's own statement at the time went further still, promising that Timeform would retain editorial independence and continue much as before.

That promise is worth holding up against everything that followed: Griffin's own successor as Chairman resigning within three years over Betfair's decision to axe a forty-year-old charity commitment; the annuals discontinued within fourteen years; the last print titles gone within twenty. None of it amounts to a broken contract — 2006's reassurance was deal-day language, not a binding guarantee — but the distance between what was promised on acquisition and what has actually happened since is, in miniature, this whole article.

Betfair's own trajectory over the following decade widened that distance further. The exchange floated on the London Stock Exchange in 2010, meaning Timeform's ultimate owner was, from that point, answerable to public shareholders rather than to racing people. In September 2015, Betfair agreed terms to merge with the Irish bookmaker Paddy Power in an all-share deal worth roughly £5 billion, former Paddy Power shareholders taking 52% of the combined group and former Betfair shareholders 48%. The merger completed on 2 February 2016, creating Paddy Power Betfair plc — and it was somewhere inside that newly enlarged group, with combined revenues above £1.1 billion from day one, that Timeform effectively stopped being a business anyone negotiated over on its own merits. On 28 May 2019, Paddy Power Betfair plc was renamed Flutter Entertainment plc, the name it still trades under.

Flutter has grown enormously since. The group now reports annual revenue above £14 billion and employs more than 27,000 people worldwide, across a brand portfolio that includes FanDuel, PokerStars, Sky Betting & Gaming, Sportsbet, Paddy Power, Betfair — and, pointedly, TVG, Flutter's own US horse-racing wagering brand. Timeform is one of dozens of names inside that structure and has not, on the public record, been bought or sold again since 2006. It has simply been carried along, twice relabelled by mergers it played no part in, inside a parent company that has grown roughly a thousandfold in market value since the year it first wrote the cheque.

Three men, sixty years, one resignation

For most of its history, Timeform was run by only two people after its founder: a striking degree of continuity for a company now several tiers deep inside a plc.

Reg Griffin joined in 1957 intending to stay two years to learn the form book; he stayed fifty. Made a director within two years and managing director within ten, he effectively ran the company's day-to-day operations from the late 1960s onward, becoming Chairman on Bull's death in 1989 and holding the role until his own retirement in 2007. Griffin founded the Timeform Charity Day at York in 1971 — its first renewal watched by the Queen, whose own horse won the big race — and over nearly forty years built it into an event that raised some £4.5 million for cancer-related causes. He died in 2014, aged 79.

Jim McGrath, "the Sage of Halifax," joined Timeform in 1974 straight from school, on his own account starting out "putting the glue on the cards." He became Griffin's eventual successor as managing director in 2000 and Chairman in 2008, all while building a parallel career as a Channel 4 Racing pundit from the programme's 1984 launch — his on-screen partnership with John Francome becoming one of the sport's most recognisable double acts.

The continuity ended abruptly, and specifically. In 2009, Betfair — Timeform's owner since 2006 — decided to withdraw its sponsorship of the Charity Day that Griffin had spent forty years building. McGrath resigned as Chairman in protest, though he stayed involved long enough to salvage the day's charitable purpose, which survives to this day as the Macmillan Charity Day. It's about as clean an illustration as you could ask for of what changed hands in 2006: not just a company, but the authority to decide what a decades-old commitment was worth keeping.

The nursery

Set the leadership rupture alongside the wider staff list and a second pattern emerges: Timeform has functioned, across seven decades, as an unusually effective finishing school for British racing journalism, broadcasting and analysis — most of whose graduates moved on and never came back to run the place.

Howard Wright took over editing Timeform's in-house magazine Racing Week in 1967, aged 21, after its previous editor died — a job Reg Griffin gave him personally. He went on to a 26-year career at the Racing Post and, decades later, wrote the definitive biography of Bull himself.

Mike Cattermole joined Timeform in Halifax in 1984 and has said he learned the mechanics of handicapping from McGrath and colleagues there. He didn't stay: a rival paper's Sporting Life Weekender poached him for three times his Timeform salary, and from there he moved through spells as jockey's agent to Willie Carson and, briefly, Lester Piggott, before building a commentating and presenting career spanning Channel 4 Racing, At The Races and Sky Sports Racing that has now run for four decades.

Simon Rowlands joined in 1986, the Monday after Dancing Brave's Eclipse win, and became Timeform's Head of Research and Development and the pioneer of its modern sectional-timing methods — developing a standardised formula for converting sectional splits into comparable figures, precisely the discipline now driving the next generation of racing analytics. He left to go freelance at the start of 2016, the same year Betfair merged into what became Flutter.

Below that top tier, three further staffers illustrate how routinely Timeform's alumni scattered into the rest of the industry rather than staying to shape the company's future: Martin Dixon, a Timeform trainee reporter who rose to Chief Reporter over ten years before moving into TV punditry at Attheraces and Racing TV; Richard O'Brien, who joined as a trainee comment writer in 1991 and left as Flat editor in 2005 to bet for a living; and Matt Taylor, who spent around fifteen years at Timeform as a handicapper before leaving in 2014 to build a career in racehorse ownership.

None of this, on its own, proves decline — a training ground that keeps producing people good enough to be poached is, by one reading, doing something right. But taken together with Griffin's forty years of institution-building ending in a resignation on principle, and the company's leading analytical mind walking out the same year its owner merged into a still-larger conglomerate, the pattern is one of a business that has been consistently better at producing talent than at retaining or rewarding it — a curious trait for a company whose parent, since 2016, has been one of the best-capitalised gambling groups in the world.

Seventy-three volumes, then silence

The most significant print closure in Timeform's history didn't happen in 2026 at all. It happened in November 2020, when the company announced it was closing what remained of its mail order operation — bringing to an end the Racehorses of... annual, its National Hunt companion Chasers and Hurdlers (running since the 1975/76 season), and the weekly Timeform Black Book.

The Racehorses series had run since Bull founded the company in 1948; by 2020 it stood at seventy-three volumes, amounting to what one industry account fairly called an encyclopaedic history of Flat racing across the modern era, alongside a long-standing reputation for blunt editorial opinion on racing politics. Announcing the closure, Timeform director Nigel Townsend framed it as a deliberate reallocation of resources towards digital services, noting that "the whole publishing industry has been transformed" in recent years. Reaction among long-standing subscribers on racing forums was genuine grief rather than shrugged acceptance — collectors still trade, donate and hunt for homes for complete runs of the hardback annuals, treating them as a permanent physical archive of the sport in a way no PDF or subscription feed can quite replicate.

Set against that closure, the 2026 announcement — ending the printed race card and moving Horses to Follow online — reads less like a new chapter and more like Timeform finally tidying up the last two print titles left standing after the 2020 clear-out.

The slow strip-down

Lay the closures, resignations, mergers and departures out in order and the pattern stops looking like a single difficult decision and starts looking like a policy that has run, quietly, for close to forty years:

• 1989 — Phil Bull dies; Reg Griffin becomes Chairman, continuing the day-to-day leadership he had effectively held since the late 1960s.

• 1992 — Timeform relinquishes its sponsorship of the Timeform Chase at Haydock, just over a decade after the race was inaugurated.

• c. 2001 — Portway Press rebuffs an earlier takeover approach, reportedly worth around £10 million.

• 2006 — Betfair buys Portway Press Ltd for a reported £15 million, promising Timeform would "retain editorial independence and continue much as before."

• 2007 — Reg Griffin retires as Chairman after fifty years with the company.

• 2009 — Betfair withdraws sponsorship of the Griffin-founded Charity Day; Jim McGrath resigns as Chairman in protest.

• 2010 — Betfair floats on the London Stock Exchange, becoming answerable to public shareholders.

• 2015 — Betfair agrees an all-share merger with Paddy Power worth around £5 billion.

• 2016 — The merger completes, forming Paddy Power Betfair plc; Simon Rowlands, the company's leading sectional-timing analyst, departs the same year to go freelance.

• 2019 — Paddy Power Betfair plc is renamed Flutter Entertainment plc.

• 2020 — The Racehorses of... and Chasers and Hurdlers annuals (seventy-three volumes' worth) and the weekly Timeform Black Book are discontinued along with the mail order operation.

• 2024 — Management of Timeform's B2B commercial data supply is handed to PA Betting Services, a third-party managing partner within the PA Media Group.

• 2026 — The printed race card and Horses to Follow — the last two print-facing consumer products — are withdrawn, moving entirely behind the Race Passes paywall.

None of this happened because Timeform's analysis stopped being good. It's worth stating plainly, because it complicates the tidier "decline" narrative, that among serious punters Timeform's ratings are still routinely cited in the same breath as Racing Post Ratings and the official BHA handicap — one of the three reference points professionals cross-check against. The analytical reputation hasn't collapsed. What's collapsed is the ownership, infrastructure and personnel that once surrounded it: independent control, the printing press, the racecourse sponsorship, a chairmanship that lasted long enough to matter, the head of research who invented the sectional-timing method the rest of the industry now uses, a seventy-three-volume physical archive, and finally the last two consumer print titles.

What the closure actually represents

Timeform's own statement on the 2026 print closure is candid about the trade-off, framing the move as freeing up investment for "digital products and services" and thanking Weatherbys and racecourses for decades of support. That thanks to Weatherbys is not incidental — Weatherbys still supplies the underlying raceday data (declarations, non-runners, weights) that Timeform's own racecards depend on, and separately produces and prints the official racecard for every British fixture, some 3.5 million cards a year, typically at a fraction of what Timeform charged for its premium alternative. Even in exiting print, Timeform remains structurally reliant on the administrative body whose own product it has just stopped competing against.

That's the real arc of the last thirty-five years or so: from an independent Yorkshire publishing house with fifty years of continuous leadership under two men, an unusually productive nursery for the sport's broadcasters and analysts, and a promise of editorial independence made on the day it was first sold, to a data licence — sold via a third-party managing partner, inside a parent renamed twice by mergers it had no say in — that racegoers now subscribe to online. Timeform hasn't been switched off. It's been quietly repositioned, decade by decade, from institution to input — and along the way it has shed not just its printing press and its independence but very nearly everyone who once made it recognisably itself.