1-- Horses that are loose on the lead usually save ground. If you are using figures that don't factor in ground loss, this will pump up their figures. To put it another way, since we factor in both ground loss and weight, the relationship between the figures of Love of Money and Tapit on TG will be much different than on Beyer-- which was part of the decision to use the former horse and not the latter.

2-- I think we have had this discussion here before, but there is a real question as to which is the cause and which is the effect. As CH has noted, sometimes there appear to be several speeds, but one clears. We would take the position that the reason a frontrunner makes a clear lead is that he is running a big one that day, and shows more speed in all parts of the race. We obviously also think getting clear and saving ground is an advantage. But again, I would like to see some examples in advance (and I heard CH and others say they don't think this will work out that well)-- I think that you will find that in cases where a lone speed is too slow (final figure) or has a negative pattern, they will not perform well on average.

3-- There is an Oscar Wilde story which ends with a woman saying, "What do you think I am!", and Oscar saying "We've already established that, we're just haggling over price". Well, I think we would all agree that 100 pounds would make a hell of a difference-- the only question is how to deal with the smaller amounts involved here. And Mike Watchmaker's position, stated so many times in DRF ("2 pounds to a horse is like a pack of cigarettes to me, you wouldn't even notice it"), is ridiculous-- we're dealing with very small distances in racing when viewed in percentage terms, and whether you would notice something (and Bailey-- or the horse for that matter--might or might not be able to) is not the question. The question is whether it has an effect, whether you notice it or not.

I went into this at the expo, and it's on the DVD-- think about what 5 pounds means to a thousand pound horse in percentage terms (1/2%). Now think of a mile, and what 1/2% of that is-- about 26 feet. Or try it in time terms-- use 1:40 for a mile, and 1/2% is half a second. Think half a second matters in mile races? Whether anyone can FEEL the difference between 99 1/2 and 100% is not the question. And the correction which both TG and Ragozin use, because over a period of time working with figures it comes out about right, is actually less than a straight 5 pounds = 1/2%. TimeForm uses a different formula, which is one reason their figures are a pain in the butt to deal with (bad beaten length corrections is another, and that ain't all). And no universal correction is completely accurate, because they won't give us the weights of the individual horses, and 5 pounds is not the same to 900 pounds as to 1200.

But ours is close.




TGJB