Quote:
Originally Posted by Ted Craven
Do you use those MPH readouts? Others have been tantalizing me with the possibilities, but no takers yet in explaining privately or publicly how they would be either more useful than, or not redundant to readouts already existing. Or how they use these (whether they also use RDSS/Val/Spec or not).
Ted
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I was working on a general answer to your questions on Quirin pace and speed figures, but got involved in researching Trackmaster speed figures (again) and rediscovered how well Val does converting them to a functional equivalent of the old drf speed figure at a fifth of a second. I may just have to agree that the speed figure part might be redundant.
For a quickie explanation, the Quirin pace and speed figures are based on the concept that the $10,000 claimer is a factor that is approximately equal at all tracks. Quirin set the $10,000 par at 100 points. The pace figure moves up or down at a tenth of a second per point and the speed figure at a fifth of a second per point from that par.
Obviously, the $10,000 par is not universal at all tracks now, if it ever was, but everyone in the par business uses some kind of semi-universal base for their figures track to track. That is how they are able to claim that a 90 at one track is the same as a 90 at another track. Horsestreet and Cynthia publishing use the base figure of 100, as does speedfigures.com. CJ's Beyer type figures use an 80, DRF Beyers around 81-83, BRIS somewhere between 88 and 92 and it looks to me like the figure for Trackmaster is somewhere between 88 and 92 also, although they are on a very different scale from BRIS.
The key factor for me is being able to use the convenience of a fifth of a second for comparison of speed figures. It may sacrifice a little bit of accuracy, but I find it much more comprehensible the the 2.67 points per fifth second that Trackmaster uses per fifth at 6 furlongs, the 2.8 points that Beyer uses at 6, or the 1.78 points per fifth that Trackmaster uses at 9 furlongs.
That was before I sat for a week with a calculator, Spec, Val and Trackmaster pdf files of the same cards. Val does a great job of converting the Trackmaster figures to the old drf style SR-TV. So does Spec, though I'm not sure where some of the reported 'original' Trackmaster figures came from. So, my conversion to a fifth of a second is already done on the speed figure part. It might be nice if RDSS would convert the Trackmaster par figure to the same scale, but I do that with my calculator anyway.
Pace figures would be nice, but we never had them in the pp files used for Val & Spec and I don't know if you now have them in the RDSS files, or not. It seems like I remember at one time hearing that TM pace figures were based on 1st call, but I don't know that for a fact. Speed figures would be easy, but possibly redundant. Pace figures; I just don't know what you have to work with.
If you want to know more about the Quirin pace and speed figures, they are discussed in at least one of the first two Quirin books, Jim Quinn's
Figure Handicapping and there is a chapter on them in the second edition of Brohammer's
Modern Pace Handicapping. There is also a good description at speedfigures.com.