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Originally Posted by Speed Figure
How does this spotlight number work? I'm looking at the Malibu and the # get's the 124 from it's last race at 6 furlongs and not the 3rd race back at 7 furlongs and the # get's the 7 furlong race from 3 back and not the 6 furlong last race.
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The four main things that go into figuring out the Spotlight Figure are distance, surface, and days since the race and finish position. Each race gets a score on a 0-100 scale that judges how close it approximates the conditions of today's race. The race with the highest score is the Spotlight.
We have some changes coming soon, actually in QA right now, and the preview pages for the Malibu looks like you see below. The old is on the left, the new on the right and it changes the 9 to a better race. The rest remain the same. The difference is that instead of using the highest score on the 0-100 scale, we look at all that score at least a 70 and from the those the fastest TFUS Speed Figure is the Spotlight Figure. We are also scrapping finish position as part of the equation.
So for example, currently the 9 might have something like this:
Last race: score 90, TFUS 118
Two back: score 80, TFUS 108
Three back: score 95, TFUS 111
The third back is scored highest so 111 is the Spotlight Figure in the current PPs. With the soon to come new design, all three scores are higher than 70 so all would qualify, and we will select the last race figure of 118. If no races qualify we just pick the highest one, but I hope to indicate this somehow as a figure we don't really like.
Hope that makes sense. Don't want to get too technical. Just a few examples of races that obviously wouldn't qualify would be if today is a mile and a sixteenth on turf and the race in question was 6f on dirt.
I'll close with this...it is VERY difficult to pick one number to represent a horses ability. No matter what method you choose, there will be a few head scratchers. I use it as a baseline to judge a horse against itself more than against the rest of the field.
(NOTE: I think we actually look at the last five races, not just the last three, but wanted to keep it simple here)
