Whether I place much weight in the idea that European quality racing from 1600m to 3200m is higher than that of Australia is immaterial. No less than 25 of Winx's victories have come at your lower limit of 1600m, or shorter, and not a single one of her victories has been registered beyond 2200m, making the upper 1000m of your bracket kind of moot. Regarding Frankel, the moot-range extends further as he never went beyond 2090m.
In the same way that you can't rely on times to determine whether one horse is better than the rest (otherwise, literally half of Australia's all-time best racehorses would have spent most of their lives racing at Dubbo and Warren), you also can't place much faith in margins. Australian elite racing is far more tactical than the thuggish slog of English racing (yes, I am Englist!).
Frankel had his spurt over just 2 seasons and more than half of his victories were restricted to his own age group, whereas just 2 of Winx's 31 consecutive wins were restricted by age. And none of her subsequent victories were restricted by gender.
When Winx completes her career in the QE in a couple of starts time she will be a rising EIGHT-year-old, Frankel bugged out at FOUR-and-a-bit.
Still, as you say all of this came in Australia which, whether we like it or not, is just Australia. But Frankel - for all his whiz-bang Best Ever tags by self-serving ratings agencies, never ventured beyond his (much, much smaller) borders either. And it's not as though a trip across the channel wouldn't have been profitable for the connections, if they weren't concerned that he might be beaten.
That last bit annoys me a little with Winx. Some small part of me wishes she had maybe finished a close second a couple of times instead of having this record-breaking run to consider. I have no doubts she could have killed them in a couple of Melbourne Cups before the handicapper put her out of business, and it would have been good to see them take an Arc or something similar on, even if it meant missing out on some stuff at home, just to test a hypothesis that only a small handful of owners get a chance to test in any given century.
Did I mention that Frankel was slow? I mean, REALLY slow? I know that we can't compare different tracks with different tracks, but comparing same tracks with same tracks is fair enough? Last year a horse called Alpha Centauri ran 10 lengths faster than Frankel did when she won the (I think) Coronation Stakes at Royal Ascot. And that's 10 lengths faster than Frankel's fastest time over the mile at Ascot, his other times were much, much slower.
Hard to fathom how the "greatest of all time" could run so much slower than Winx no matter how many tries he had. I mean, when Winx won her Doncaster on a soft-6 she ran 1:35.2, that is still 15 lengths faster than anything Frankel ever did, even when he raced on good tracks. The only way one can really maintain that Frankel was a superior animal to Winx - vis a vis the times they ran - is to base it all on an underlying assumption that when they say English tracks are 'good', they are really 'heavy'. That might help to explain why Frankel's connections never ventured to mainland Europe or America, where tracks rated 'good' are 'good'. Maybe he was just a slow swimmer
