Basic Beyer Speed Figure question

[chickenhead]

Just reading Picking Winners again over lunch, have a basic question or two.

Am I correct that the flow of adjustment is from horses raw time plus or minus variant and then adjusted for distance?

Second question regards variants. Using Beyers method, all variants are equal, i.e. a 6F slow 1/5th and 1 3/8 slow 1/5 are counted the same variant wise when calculating daily variant....that does not make sense to me.

In the same way that running 1/5th off par in 1 3/8th is a better effort than running 1/5th off par in 6F, wouldn't the same variant in real terms have proprotionally more effect the longer the race, shouldn't you then scale each races variant based on distance before calculating a daily variant, the same way that you scale the final times to get figs?

Any thoughts?

[Valuist]

Re: question 2, I think he originally kept the variants the same for sprints and routes but I know as time went on he realized that you often (probably always) should split your variants for sprints and routes. I also know they use projection for a majority of the figures. If horses a,b,c,d have been running in the 70-75 range and face each other again, maybe the teletimer says they should be in the 85-90 range but logic would state otherwise. This is why we've occasionally seen race 1 run in 1:10 2/5 and get an inferior number to race 7 run in 1:11 1/5.

[cj]

The raw time is given a rating from a chart specifically for that distance, then adjusted by the variant.

1/5 of a second is worth more the shorter the distance. Variants are not calculated in 1/5s, but in points. Also, races of a different structure (# of turns) aren't lumped together to get a variant most of the time. In other words, the variant for a 6f race will not be the same as the variant for a 9f race.

[chickenhead]

thanks for the answers.

valuist, the projection part seems to me the most daunting part of it, as in time consuming. I know you talked about projections on your website CJ, I will go back and read how you handle it. Sounds like you guys only physically intervene in a small percentage of races....