hey Zorro,

Quite a few years ago now (between 1994-97) I used to do something similar. But the actual time they ran wasn't important. Actually, I didn't the study times they ran.

I used to buy the Sporting Globe each week and use their brilliant Race Photos for the 800m, 400m and wining post. I would track each horse for the last 400m and measure how many lengths it gained or lost in the business end of the race, and give each horse a rating (100 being the best for the race).

You could then compare the performances of each horse in the race to one another. I always took special notes of races where only 1 or 2 horses in a race ran the last 800m (or 400m) at least 2.5 lengths faster than the rest of the field. It was a brilliant pointer to a horse improving and running well in its next 2 starts.

I would look at the pace of a race, and make a judgement on whether it was fast early, slow etc, to further analyse the merit of these runs.

I really noticed some quite excelent performances with that method, and quite a lot of these horses went on to win at Group level soon after. So you can back them as they step up through the grades.

My advice is to keep it up, it's a good method, I found it very rewarding. A lot of value in my selections, as it wasn't a common method of analysis.

Good luck.