Do I have to break out my standard diatribe about all the potential pitfalls of speed figures again?
The times of races obviously matter, but there are loads of technical and subjective issues that impact their accuracy on top of extremely complex interrelationships between individual horse ability, race development and surface that can impact the times.
IMO, (backed by years of data and testing) the best use of figures is to help find the strong and weak fields within classes, especially in races where the quality is tough to determine (maidens and other very lightly raced horses). If you spend a lot of time worrying about a few points either way, just line up 3-4 of the best sets of figures out there and your head will explode in race after race when you see all the small and sometime HUGE differences.
Wind, clock, run up, malfunctioning timers etc…all matter, but this Champagne was almost obviously strong. Upping the figure didn’t change my opinion. It verified it.