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Originally Posted by markgoldie
I run into this problem all the time because I advise a friend on claiming horses and often there is a great deal of money at stake.
It's almost like a "chicken or egg" problem. There are many reasons why so-called "man-made" classes do not reflect much about the quality of the horses racing in those classes. So just because a horse raced in a certain written class does not automatically prove a certain ability level.
Okay.
So the "class" people will say, it's not how fast you go, but who you beat that's important. But how do you know how good the horse you beat is or might have been?? By the written class in which he was previously entered? We already know that proves nothing in and of itself. Plus, how do we know the current form of the so-called class horse we just beat? Answer: We don't.
And so, we're back to the teletimer and speed figs. In the final analysis, all we know is that better horses tend to run faster than lesser animals. And so, if you are a "classy" horse, somewhere along the line you will have to demonstrate speed, because without speed, I am at a total loss as to how to determine the class of an animal.
With turf-route horses, late bursts are often key. But they are hard to measure on the teletimer. And so, establishing a true class level of these horses is difficult. That's the bad news. The good news is that they are a smallish clan and so they tend to run against each other frequently. This makes selecting the better horses a lot easier.
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The answer is those chicken and egg situations is that you often don't know and CAN'T know.
However, more experienced older horses more or less sort themselves out over time. So the man made classifications tend to fairly efficient. You can recognize strong and weak fields relative to average for the class fairly easily by simply looking at the horses in the race. Also, when figure differences are extreme, that is also telling you something because even though small differences may be have accuracy and other issues, large differences rarely will.
In races for lightly raced horses (maidens and limited winners), it's much harder to classify. In races like these I tend to focus more attention on the figures knowing full well that there could be accuracy and other issues. In these instances you can also watch races a little more closely and "see" hints about quality that may not be present in the figures.
There is no perfect solution, but by using all the tools in the toolbox and recognizing the pluses and minuses of each I think you can do a better job than someone that is wed to a single approach or that is closed minded to the value of various approaches.
