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[MJC922]

Since I've had many years of speed figure-making, I'll pass along what my general process was before moving away from time altogether (for what it's worth).

It's good that you're seeking out wind measurements. Wind adjustments were step one in my process, break down all of the times for the day into segments and then adjust them for wind speed / direction. This step has no need for pars of any kind, what you need is global historical data which shows how much of an adjustment to make to the times of each segment when such and such wind speed hits a horse at a specific angle. So you need a function that accepts four parameters, wind speed, wind direction, horse's speed, horse's direction. For the latter you need to know what the avg angles are of each segment at that track.

So now moving on to step two as wind has been 'taken out of it' as Ragozin might say. Understand you can't do anything reliable with pace until wind has been taken out if it. Next step then, adjust for pace. This step requires pars but not CLASS pars, it needs fractional and final pars for that specific track / distance / surface. You need to flag the segments that are faster than par for each final time logged on the card and know what kind of impact that had on the final time. So you have another function to come up with, i.e. when SegmentA was this much faster than the par for that specific final time, how much to reduce the final time. Yes reduce it, it's always a reduction, 'less than ideal' pacing doesn't make anyone go faster, it only makes them go slower.

Again I would suggest as with the wind adjustments above use real historical data for this, never shortcut, no speculation, no guessing, not some theory of what it 'should be' if you're some physics expert. The problem is not going to be finding the impact of pace from the research but rather obtaining the fractional / final time averages at the track / distance / surface as you'll find many will have far too small of a sample size to be accurate within a fifth of a second let alone a tenth. If you don't know par pace for the final time then it's not really possible to effectively adjust for pace. in these cases you might as well leave pace out of the calculation. e.g. Try getting par pace for the Derby with however many 10f dirt races CD cards in a decade.

At this point, take your final times now and convert them into speed ratings. I'm not going to go over that part, most people are familiar with speed charts, Beyer, proportional time etc. You've brought quite a bit of value-added information into the calculations at this stage, you've taken both wind and pace 'out of it'.

Step three is the track variant, this is where you finally need the class pars (or the projections). I do like class pars in theory but in my opinion very few people have accurate ones. Unfortunately they really need to be accurate otherwise the track variant calculation (which depends upon a rather small sample size) will be skewed.

Anyway, (assuming you have class pars) at this point calculate the deviations from par. I wouldn't worry about a 'daily' variant, let's leave the daily part out of it... I would suggest taking the most recent race on the surface and work backward until you detect significant change, that'll be your track variant for the block of races. If the block goes back for a week before changing significantly, lucky you, if it goes back just two races these things happen too. Don't worry about breaking out by distance either, you already took wind out of it, so if your speed charts are good there should be no need to have separate variants by number of turns.

Ok, you made it to step four, here's where it gets ugly. Apply the variant to your speed rating and what numbers look to be way 'out of line' vs the class pars. This is where you build in a safety net which flags races for you (the human) to follow up on. Even before step one in the process make sure you haven't let any typos slip through. If you find it's a typo you can just fix and move on, if it's not a typo then you'll be forced to make a projection. Good luck to you in your time studies.