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Originally Posted by cj
I did some research today that was pretty enlightening. I've always known turf finishes are tighter than dirt finishes in general, but I didn't know to what extent. The value of a beaten length in a turf race is much greater than a dirt race. It actually breaks out really clearly by distance, less than a mile and a mile and over:
< 1m Value of a beaten length in turf races is 1.6 times that of a similar dirt race
> 1m Value of a beaten length in turf races is 2.0 times that of a similar dirt race
I use different values for the two, but not to that extent. Beyer made and adjustment to use his 6.5 furlong chart for turf routes, but that is about the 1.3 to 1.4 range, not 2.0. I don't believe Rags or Thorograph or BRIS or Equibase differentiate between the surfaces.
This is definitely something I'll be digging into a lot deeper the next few weeks. It sure looks like also rans in turf races are being given more credit than they deserve by speed figure guys, myself included.
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I did some similar research, but not for figure making purposes. It was for a class oriented application. At the time I also broke it out by synthetic (which was still relevant) and off tracks (because margins on off tracks tend to be larger). I'm sure I still have the spreadsheet somewhere.
I also found evidence that winning margins don't expand as much as theory suggests they should as distances stretch out.
It's an interesting issue. I mentally filed it away as another reason to be skeptical about some figures, but found no real way to use it for my own purposes because margins also vary with pace and I couldn't control for that unless I used pace figures (which defeated the purpose of my class research). I shifted my attention to finishing positions, but ran into complications there also.
I'm going to revisit this soon for myself related to class. It's on my "to do" list. Now that I have a database to work with maybe I can make some progress.
Good luck with the figures.
