Amazing how many people remember Post Time. That show was ahead of its time. Unfortunately, for the producers.

I didn't use all of Pratt's e-mails to me. In another one he raised the issue of lanes of compaction, and that he suspected that some riders (he named Bailey specifically) could figure that out. As a practical matter, for a lot of reasons (the track changing, sample size, changing lanes) we can't do anything with this, but that doesn't mean it isn't happening.

From things Porcelli has said they can adjust the water per pass, one easy way being to speed up or slow down the truck. Yes, he tests moisture content that way himself-- if you use the search engine on this board and put in Porcelli you will find more specifics in the first posts by me mentioning him here.

The evidence makes it clear that the assumption the track stays the same speed is false, but there is no direct correlation that can be used to determine track speed from moisture content because of the interlocking variables (soil content etc.) There might be based directly on drop hammer tests measuring energy return, but I'm not even sure of that. All you can do is work with the data trying to make sense of the results.

I have averaged about 10 tracks over the years, but I gave up a couple (Northern Cal, Pen), so I'm now averaging about eight. We now have a very strong staff of figure makers-- Greg, who has been with me since day one, and two deprogrammed ex-Raggie figure makers (Paul and Nick). Between an actual person making variant decisions about every race run in North America (no more figures done purely by using claiming variants) and a very sophisticated computer ground loss program for small tracks where we don't get actual ground loss reports (and the ground for each day at those tracks is then reviewed by a person checking the chart comments against the computer's ground), we have a really, really tight data base.



TGJB