I may be off track here a little and excuse me if so. The track condition in regard to firmness, the moisture, and the lenght of grass is one factor in the speed of the race. The atmospheric conditions such as air pressure and the speed and direction of wind is another factor. The racing style of the horses within the race is another. Then there is the jock. Very few races are won by the winning horse jumping in front and going fullbore to the finish line.
Invariably if the winner gets in front and stays in front it will only just fast enough to fend off any challenge. often the winner will be the horse that runs the leader down. Hence the speed a race is run is individual only to that race. Records happen when two or more horses are vying for the same position in the field.
Regards Beton

After more investigation I'm very sorry I started.

Anyway here is a race where the t600 discrepancy is an incredible 2.44 seconds.

http://www.ajc.com.au/sectional/21_01_06/RACE06_B.rtf

So which time is credible?

Not that easy to figure out. Particularly since freak wind might be at play. So to partially nullify that I looked at 800m times.

The fastest 800m time I've found for Randwick 1200m races is 44.89 seconds.

Yet here Cooder recorded 43.19 and all but 1 of the 11 starters beat 44.89.

So I figure Sportscolour is very wrong.

Interestingly next time out Cooder featured in the Stewards Reports giving all indication he was knackered from the previous run.

Sorry La Mer!
Must have been the time of day.
I looked up the wrong column, and the time seemed close enough so I posted it.
The proper time for 1400 M in that price range and class I have 83.530818 sec.
Cheers.

Sectionals
 

Thanks jfc. Another good example. I noticed sportcolour's link to this race for indivual sectionals doesn't work - I had dismissed the sectional information and the official 600 time worked ok when reviewing the race.

The wind speed at the time of this race was 28km/hr with gusts of 33km/h - this is not too high. The direction of the wind was down the straight and would have assisted fast last 600 times but this race was run with a fast first sectional into the wind hence a slower last 600 was possible.

I have also passed the question onto Sportcolour and waiting to see a response.

After reading everything here. Where does that leave us with a race in front of us to handicap ? Averaging out a horses sectionals and distance times I think. One of the reasons I mainly stick to 4yr, olds and up is because it a lot easier to do for most of the field, as there is [useually] enough info. in the runners stats to do so.

I believe the info. regarding sectionals and race times are important, very important but they both are still only two of many pieces of the puzzle. Using time in Aust. racing conditions as the main piece of selection criteria would be flawed and giving it more importance than it deserves [and it does deserve a decent amount]. We should except that many stats, just can't be reduced to scientific accuracy in horse racing and time is just another one of them. A variable often influenced by unpredictable factors. Many of them already having been mentioned in this thread so far.

What an exercise in futility!

Why these grotesque 600m time discrepancies at Randwick on January 21st?

+138
+11
-101
+8
+45
-251
+43
+99

(in centiseconds)

Eventually my only hypothesis that holds up is that the clocks on the 7 Sportcolour (Equitime) 200m sensors were out of whack.

It's very easy for compute clocks to lose the plot, but presumably also very easy to resynchronise them.

I note that the Randwick times started working properly again in February, so maybe that meant the return from holidays of the officer responsible for pressing the resynchronise button.

Your looking for scientific measurement at the bottom of a swamp JFC. Pea brained humans are involved[?]

they dont make a tape to measure that one jfc,it would be like trying to measure total zero..............cheers.......slowman............ ....