Okay, Jim asked a lot of good questions that go to the heart of the matter when making figures. I'll deal with them in sections, partly because this will be time consuming, and because it will be a lot for people to digest. It will make things easier if everyone waits until I finish with this some time tomorrow before asking questions or commenting.

"Have there been any studies to try and measure what the difference in running time would be between a track with say 4% moisture and then a track with 10% moisture".

"Do smaller changes matter enough to warrant making changing track variants"?

The only published scientific study I'm aware of directly concerning moisture content is the one I referenced in the Expo presentation, which is available on the web-- Mall put a link to it here originally, so you might be able to get to it with a search on this site, or you can do a larger search using the title ("Interrelationships Between Moisture Content Of The Track, Dynamic Properties Of The Track And The Locomotor Forces Exerted By Galloping Horses"). As was noted in my presentation, relatively small changes in moisture content produced scientifically MEASURABLE differences in rebound energy, which in our terms means track speed. Think about it-- if the differences produce a 1% difference in the "speed" of the track, and we're talking about a mile race going in 1:40 (100 seconds), that's a difference of a second. Which in racing (and figure) terms is a lot-- about 4 points.

But there is no way to directly answer your question, because how do you scientifically measure track "speed"? That is why one of the scientists sent me the e-mail saying that he thought the most accurate data for measuring this was ours-- if we had a way of correlating moisture content in a blind study with what we determined to be track speed, it would be interesting to see the results. I offered this, did not get a reply-- I'm going to bring it up again at some point.

The other point to keep in mind is that soil composition plays a big part in this-- some tracks are going to be more responsive to moisture than others. Likewise, a difference between 3 to 5 percent might not have the same effect as that between 5 and 7 percent at a given track, and different parts of the track can have different moisture contents because of shade, drainage, and different track maintenance (at Belmont and Aqueduct, for example, they don't use the big water trucks in the chute, according to Porcelli).

So all in all, what we know is that moisture content makes a difference, and that it's hard to quantify directly what that difference is. Which leaves us knowing that it is wrong to make the assumption that track speed (to say nothing of the relationship between distances) stays constant, but having no OBJECTIVE way of dealing with it. Meaning, we have to use what that scientist agreed was the best available method-- the past histories of the horses who run over the track-- to determine the "speed" of the track.

More tomorrow.



TGJB