Quote:
Originally Posted by DeltaLover
This thread presents enough data to refute Bayer’s conjecture about the diminished significance of beaten lengths in proportion to distance.
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If you want my honest opinion, I think the speed figure model of handicapping is simply
wrong assuming your goal is to understand what's actually going on at the track.
It's more about the quality of the field, how the race develops, and how the track is playing. The fractions and final times reflect the interaction between those 3 things, but they don't necessarily reflect how well the horses ran even if you had perfectly accurate pace and final time numbers (which you often won't). How competitively the race is run, the horse's positions, the moves, how tiring the track is etc.. matter a lot and can cause wide variations in numbers.
The reason speed figures pick so many winners is that better horses
tend to produce a "faster outcomes" and horses that finish near the front are typically the better horses. So better horses tend to have faster figures.
But IMHO, if you want to create the "correct" model of evaluating horses it has more to do with an analysis of the field going into a race (how fast they generally are, what their running styles are, what quality of horses they've been running against), watching the race develop, and analyzing the result chart and race flow to determine how that track and development impacted the outcome.
You can create metrics that measure these things that can be used as tools in the analysis (including pace and speed figures), but in the end it's better to subjectively analyze a race using those tools and NOT let the numbers and theories dictate to you what you think happened. The results on the track speak for themselves and sometimes they reflect reality better than the numbers. It's a matter of getting better at understanding it all in a comprehensive way. No easy task.
