Patterns In The Sand....

Chapter Four: How To Calculate Standard Times

My wife Sarah is not comfortable with flying. She has always said her fear will never stop her flying, but there is no denying the sheer angst she displays whenever the plane we are taking accelerates along the runway towards take off. More often than not, she will only release her vice-like grip on my hand when we are well into the flight, having levelled out above the clouds, and the stewardess has asked her whether she would like a drink from the trolley. When we land she usually cannot contain her relief that she is still alive, and she has been known to kiss the tarmac at Stansted Airport.

After the euphoria of surviving another flight comes the sobering realisation that your holiday in the sun has ended, and you have to go back to work on Monday. This is a depressing thought for most of us, but on this occasion I was feeling exactly the opposite. Having returned from our mini-break in Spain where I had developed my strategy for betting on the all weather tracks, I could not wait to get stuck in.

That September in 2002 I started producing my speed ratings for the three all weather race-tracks that were operating at the time, namely Lingfield, Southwell, and Wolverhampton. There were only a couple of meetings each week, but my aim was to compile figures for at least two months before the winter all weather campaign started in earnest in November.

I was faced with one major problem almost immediately. The British public first saw all weather horse racing at Lingfield in 1989, but after recurring problems in 2001 the track operators Arena Leisure decided to invest 2.8million pounds in a brand new Polytrack surface. The problem was that my standard times had been based upon times recorded on the old Equitrack surface, and you could be sure the new surface would have an effect.

But there was more. A few months previously, Arena Leisure had also replaced the deteriorating surface at Wolverhampton with 7,000 tons of new fibresand. And the year before there had also been extensive refurbishment work carried out at Southwell. It was abundantly clear that I was going to have to calculate new standard times for all three tracks.

This next section gives an overview of how to produce a standard time for a specific race distance at a given track.

The first race meeting at Lingfield on the new surface took place on 13th November 2001 and so I would start my calculations from that date. Two days later the first six furlong race was run. It was a race for maiden horses and the winner was called Last Exhibit who came home in a time of 1m 12.63secs.

The race is listed under the old class structure and rated as class D. This equates today to class 4. The adjustment table shows a figure of 6.3secs against class 4. This means we generally expect a class 4 horse to run 6.3 seconds per mile slower than the standard time.

Six furlongs is 0.75 of a mile, so we multiply 6.3 by 0.75 to give 4.72.

Deduct 4.72secs from the winning time of 1m 12.63s to give 1m 07.91s

The same calculation was carried out for all the six furlong races on the new surface at Lingfield, and this came to a total of twenty nine races. The resulting series of times included five times below 1minute 7secs, and five were slower than 1minute 8secs. I discarded these times as extreme.

This left me with nineteen individual times, and I sorted them into order as below:

1m 07.14s | 1m 07.14s | 1m 07.17s | 1m 07.25s | 1m 07.26s | 1m 07.30s | 1m 07.35s | 1m 07.63s | 1m 07.63s

1m 07.65s | 1m 07.65s | 1m 07.80s | 1m 07.81 | 1m 07.82s | 1m 07.87s | 1m 07.88s | 1m 07.90s | 1m 07.90s | 1m 07.91s

I took the middle three median figures (shown in red), added them together, and then divided by three to give an average time of 1m 07.64s

This is my Standard Time for a six furlong race at Lingfield.

If you follow a similar process for each race distance at each race track, then you can produce your own set of standard times. To save you the time you can refer to the Standard Times tables in the Appendix

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