CHAPTER TWO

SPEED FIGURES

oBelow are the mathematical procedures for finding a horses speed rating figure. There are no explanations as to why certain procedures are carried out, or how certain figures such as the grade tables are configured. It is not my intention to re-write Nick Mordins book and I strongly recommend that anyone contemplating producing their own figures purchase Mordin on Time available from Aesculus Press. The main aim of this book is what to do with the figures and how to use them. As an example I have shown the speed figures I calculated for the meeting at Lingfield on Saturday the 4th of January 2003. In column A is the race number shown in the official results published in the Raceform Update. The first thing to look for is the grade of race, 1-7 this goes in column D. Banded races are always 7.

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oThe figure in column E is from the grade tables and 6.9 represents grade 6. The grade tables are shown in full below. The times are per mile.
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The actual calculations can be broken down into five steps.
qqSTEP 1 COMPARE RACE TIME WITH STANDARD TIME :-
Next take the race winners time, in this first race the time was 3m 27.50 and deduct the standard time for the course and distance. Standard times for the All weather tracks are shown in the appendix at the back of the book. How they are compiled will be explained in chapter four. For a 2 mile race at Lingfield the standard time is 3m 14.71. The difference is 12.79 seconds. This is the difference for a 2m race so to equate the race to 1m you divide by 2 giving 6.39. This figure goes into column C. The standard times in the appendix also show the fractions you need to divide by to equate each race to 1 mile. For instance for a 6f race you would divide by .75.

00STEP 2 IS THE FIGURE + OR - :-
Next check column C against column E , if the number in C is bigger place a - in column F, if it is smaller put a +. The difference between columns C and E goes into G. After carrying out this procedure for all races the table will look like this.

qqSTEP 3 CALCULATE GOING ALLOWANCE :-
You now need to weed out any slow or exceptional fast times. So in column G put a line through the two highest and two lowest figures. Add up the four remaining numbers and divide by four. This will give you the going allowance for the track that day. If it is a seven race card discard the two highest and two lowest leaving three, and for a six race card the highest and lowest leaving four. You will usually find the figures in G are either all + or all - but sometimes they are mixed. In the above example, after weeding out the unwanted figures you are left with -.45, +.32, -1.22, and -1.04. These add up to -2.39, divide by four and you are left with a going allowance of -.60

STEP 4 CALCULATE WINNERS SPEED FIGURE :-
To arrive at a speed figure for each winner deduct or add (in this case deduct) the going allowance from the figure in column C, multiply by five and take the result away from a hundred. This is the speed rating for the winning horse and goes in column B. The final table is shown below.

STEP 5 THE REST OF THE RUNNERS :-
After allocating a figure for each winner you need to deal with the rest of the runners. First of all write the speed figure next to each winner in the Raceform Update. Then simply divide the number of lengths each horse trailed the winner by the race distance, (the figure in brackets in the standard times appendix), and deduct it from the winners figure. This seemed very complicated and time consuming when I first started the figures so I divided each race distance by all margins up to 10 lengths and produced the chart on the following page. Once I had this chart there were no calculations to make, it was a simple matter of lining up the lengths beaten with the race distance to find the required figure. If the race you were looking at was 1m4f and the second placed horse was beaten 6 lengths then you need to take 4 points off the winners rating.

So in a nut shell that is how the figures are produced. There is no secret formula and no mislaid document found in a dusty trunk just simple mathematics. You now have a speed figure for each horse so what do you do with them. In Mordin on Time he suggests simply keeping them in the weekly supplement or in an exercise book. Unfortunately if you keep records this way retrieving them becomes a nightmare. The Lingfield meeting we have just been looking at involved 107 horses, and during the 2002/03 winter season over 3000 horses ran on the all weather. In chapter five I will explain how I overcame this problem.