low sun & 1% of Frost/racing's frustrating dilemmas.

​Back in the day when health & safety was just a namby-pamby notion – incidentally, the word ‘namby-pamby’ came from the mind of a ‘hack writer’ Henry Carey as a derogatory nick-name for the poet Ambrose Philips, noted for writing ‘adulatory odds addressed to the young children of wealthy parents’. He also used the term ‘pilly-piss’ to insult Philips. Thankfully the latter did not root itself in the language. I digress. – in wait of its moment in history, when racing people wanted to be entertained, the weather had to be more than a few degrees below freezing to curtail their sport.
I remember reading in a racing book (cannot locate the source) that in around the 1920’s, if I recall, Catterick races looked in jeopardy due to frost until someone with a propensity for lateral thinking asked a local farmer to herd his flock of sheep around the course several times. The warmth of the sheep and the action of their hooves on the grass and soil took out the frost and allowed racing to commence. I dare say the ground was gluey and slimy but heigh-ho, they raced and a good time was had by all.
Not a viable option in this day and age, of course. But when racing is in jeopardy due to frost in only some parts of the course and the general temperature in above freezing, I am always left frustrated when the meeting is cancelled. Surely it is not beyond the wit and wisdom of an agricultural machinery company to invent a mobile directed heating device to remove frost in a similar manner as can be achieved by pouring warm water on frozen ground. During the season, meetings will be cancelled due to parts of a racecourse in the line of shadow being still frozen while the rest of the course is raceable. It is maddening to clerks-of-courses and everyone else: surely a solution is only a lateral thought away.
Low sun is more of a baffler as it does fall into the clutches of health & safety officers or jockeys to give them their correct job title. I am not mocking jockeys for wanting fences taken out due to low sun. As drivers, we all know what it is like when the sun lies low in a cloudless sky. There is one particular lane around where I live which I have learned to avoid when the sun is low in the sky as it removes visibility by 100% in places and it is a nightmare of real possibility to run-down dog-walkers or a child who daily walked that lane to catch the school bus.
Low sun holds the very real threat to the well-being of horse and rider.
I have two possible solutions, both costly, I suspect, and perhaps unworkable. Here goes.
In an age of transportable or mobile fences, is it possible to reconfigure racecourses to race the opposite way to normal when low sun has command of the situation. If Aintree, for example, were subject to a weather forecast that had a 60% or more chance of low sun the following day, if they could race right-handed instead of left-handed, would that prove a solution? Starts would have to be flexible, the winning post, too, not to mention the problem of patrol cameras and the photo-finish camera. Not an easy-fix but worth debate, I suggest. Obviously, the problem may be transferred to the back-stretch, rather than the home-straight, but the configuration of the course may make the problem less of a problem. It is a suggestion and it might work for some courses but not others.
My second suggestion is more feasible, though more expensive to implement, I fear. In cricket, side-screens are used so that batsman can see the flight of the ball. I propose something similar for racecourses. What is needed to be known is the exact angle between the eyes of horse and jockey and the position of the sun on the horizon. We are talking low sun, so perhaps no more than 30% of angle. If a number of upright slotted posts were erected in the line of sight, black screens could be pulled into position, either electronically or by brute strength, to the exact position to block out the glare of the sun. My idea is basic and naïve, though I am certain an engineer using sensors and modern gadgetry could perfect the principle and make it easily workable. Man has walked on the moon and sent craft to Mars and beyond. Surely, we can block out the sun once in a while!