With 40 runners to choose from, it can be a daunting task to narrow things down and pick your Grand National fancy. Using past trends and statistics, though, we can try to whittle down the field to help you pick a winner.

The starting point will be the age of the winner. Horses older than 11 have a poor record, 12 year olds have won a couple of times in the last three decades, but horses in their teens haven’t won for nearly 100 years.

I’m confident taking out all horses aged over 11, so that’s Bless The Wings, Folsom Blue and Just A Par. With no winning seven year old for nearly 80 years, we can easily take out Ramses De Teillee too.

Trainers have a conundrum when producing a horse fit for this race and the trends significantly point to having a prep run within an eight-week period. So I’ll be taking out all horses that haven’t seen a racecourse within the last 56 days.

They are: Rock The Kasbah, Step Back, Go Conquer, One For Arthur, Valtor and Pleasant Company.

In regards to preparation, we can also highlight that the optimum time to come to Aintree is between a horses fourth and seventh run of the season, so let’s get rid of all horses within the remaining field that have had fewer than three runs or more than six this season: Mala Beach, Rathvinden, Regal Encore, Noble Endeavour and Joe Farrell.

That’s 15 of the field already out of our thoughts.

We can then move on to the weight carried by the winner, a stat that has been broken a few times as the quality of the race improves, but still one to keep the right side of in principal.

Carrying over 11st 1lb is a real hindrance and for that reason we can take out the following from the remainder: Anibale Fly, Tiger Roll, Outlander and Don Poli.

Horses that have at least shown they can make the frame during the season make up the profile of most National winners. So we will eliminate any horses from the remaining 21 that haven’t placed this National Hunt season: Minella Rocco, Ballyoptic and Monbeg Notorious.

Past winners of the race usually came to Aintree with more than 10 runs over chase fences, but fewer than 25 runs over them. So we’ll take out all the remaining horses not in that sweet spot of their chasing careers: Blow By Blow, Ultragold, Livelovelaugh and Up For Review.

We have to start being ruthless now with 14 runners left on our list.

History hasn't been kind to female jockeys, so for the purpose of this exercise we will overlook Valseur Lido and Tea For Two.

Lake View Lad and Dounikos, while not carrying over 11st 1lb, are rated in an area that proves difficult to win from, so we can lose them too.

This race is, of course, a huge stamina test, so we need horses proven over long distances. We can therefore eliminate any horses that haven’t won over a greater distance than three miles, which takes out Warriors Tale, Magic Of Light, A Toi Phil and Captain Redbeard.

We’re paying six places at Betway, so the six we are left with are (in order of preference):

WALK IN THE MILL , JURY DUTY , VIEUX LION ROUGE , SINGLEFARMPAYMENT , GENERAL PRINCIPLE  and VINTAGE CLOUDS .

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