Hi

I am new to this forum. I am fiddling around with time ratings and found the different points of view on this thread interesting. I am slowly putting together a set of my own par times and will probably be restricting my use of these par times to races of 1600 metres or less, as I feel time ratings for distances any greater than 1600 metres are subject to too much variation.

A problem I see though is that a race over 1600 metres could still have horses in it that have recently raced over 1800 or 2000 metres and knowing the value of these runs can be important. The problem with calculating a time rating for a distance race is that there can be great variations in the winning times (due to lack of pace, etc.) which leads to great variations in the time rating (when compared to the variations in ratings for shorter distances).

At the other end of the distance scale, I have also noticed that winning times for 1000 metre races seem to be bunched quite a bit closer together than the winning times for races over 1200 and 1400 metres, meaning ratings for 1000 metre races may end up being greater than they should be (when comparing them to ratings for 1200 and 1400 metre races).

What I am wondering is: do people that have developed and used their own time ratings make allowances in their calculations for the distance the time rating has been run over (apart from the fact that there is a small difference in the time per length as the distance increases or decreases) ?

I hope I have explained myself well enough here