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Tom, in my mind an unbalanced pace is the principal cause of the single race bias, either too much or too little speed in the field. You're an ex-Sartin guy; think match-up.
Bye and large, I think track biases are caused by track maintenance, lack of same, and weather. It doesn't matter much what the cause is, the meat of the matter is to separate the real thing from the mirage of a bias. Evaluation of track biases has been a specialty (or fetish, take your pick) of mine for over 30 years.
Because everyone has become familiar or obsessed with pace handicapping, I have more or less been forced to rely on soft skills like bias identification and evaluation, body language, and pre-race warmup evaluation to stay competitive at the windows. Come to think of it, (proper application of) form cycle evaluation still creates value at times, but is really hard to do well consistently, because it demands time and focused concentration.
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