Hi Punter 57,
as i previously said,
"A Good Class Indicator should produce: a. The highest percentage of WINNERS in its HIGHEST RATED Horses, and the lowest percentage of WINNERS in its LOWEST RATED Horses;"

Using prizemoney doesn't achieve the above.

By using the appropriate Speed/Sectionals it WILL provide a smooth transition thru the rankings.
As I also previously said by analysing past winners sectionals you will find which sections or segments of the race are more predictive of the winner then others.


"We know that the fastest horse "on the day" has won the race after the fact: obviously, that horse had the speed at "the right time" since it WON. What we'd like to know is how you know IN ADVANCE that that nag that's always coming home "like a rocket" in every race is NOT going to do so today or, conversely that the 100-1 shot WILL (and be on it!!!!)."


The use of the Standard Deviation function comes in very handy in the above comments an in your 1500m Olympic Final example, it is also one of the most powerful functions to use in racing, if its used correctly you can develop a speed performance envelope for each runner based on its past performances

The performance envelope will be a Quick Time an a Slow Time, but before you do that you need to find the Standard Error in your sample size(each individual horses LTD Past Performances) which is STDev/Sqrt(Number of starts).
Once you have that figure you can then apply it firstly to find the Slow Time
you would use the following formula; Avg LTD Time+(1.96*STd Error figure) the reasoning for using 1.96 most performers running 1.96 STDev's slower then their avg LTD would lose.

Now to find a Horses Quick Time you basically do the same as above but you need to substitute the 1.96 with another figure, if you look at past quick times in a Horses previous form you will find a much lower figure then the 1.96 STDev's when a Horse has run its best performances.

The simplest thing to do once your achieved the above is to combine each Horses StDev with the above Times an run them thru a Monte Carlo simulator which will provide you with a good set of probabilities...