I completely understand and agree with the concept of using TG fig’s to quantify how fast said horse ran on said day. I probably didn’t do a good enough job framing my question, Obviously, in general you can’t compare different preps ran on different surfaces under different pace scenarios etc, and just look at the clock and come to a hard and fast conclusion. A large % of time the horse posting the winning time didn’t run the best number.

This year there was the weird deeper track at Santa Anita, I haven’t seen a definitive opinion on what credence to put into that? I would say in the past SA was a speed favoring strip on big days/preps. Was that the case this year? How much work did the new ml favorite actually do in putting away Insta Grand before being caught from the clouds by Roadster? Those final times were slow, but Game Winner ran a good number finishing second.

Anyway, my point was more so the outlier of the Sundland time, and I appreciate the answer above. I guess it doesn’t mean anything, and as I’ve said I normally pay little to no attention to final times. But 48-72 hours out you’re looking at everything trying to find “something.” And looking at the raw times you find a horse that’ll be ~35-1 that ran a full 20 lengths faster than other prep winners. I assume this happens every year and I just have never paid head to it previously. But I was curious as to what others thought of that prep in general, and probably should have simply stated the question as such. Just trying to make sure I dot all the I’s and cross all the T’s, because my gut tells me that this race, especially with OB scratching, is going to produce serious prices.