Hi Everyone,
Over several years I have read several books on racing including texts by Don Scott and Paul Sagar and others.

In most of these books the approach to handicapping races and runners is to alot a given kilogram weight for each class of race and assume that a runner would have to improve by a given number of kilograms to be competitive in the next higher race class.

For example, if a typical maiden race is allotted 40kg as a base and a class 1 was equal to 41kg then the maiden winner would need a weight advantage of 1kg to be competitive in the class 1 race.

I decided to check this out against my own database comprising over 41,500 races with 453,700 runners.

I narrowed down the search to just study the average race times for tracks rated as GOOD, at a distance of 1200 meters for Maiden and Class 1 races.

The result was that the average races time for a Maiden race was 71.60539 seconds and for a Class 1 71.02165 seconds.

The difference between these two averages id 0.58374 seconds in favour of the Class 1 races.

This means that a Maiden winner would have to improve their race time by over half a second to successfully compete in a Class 1 race.

My question is what Weight would 0.58 seconds represent over 1200meters.

In many texts I have read the accepted standard of 1.5kg represents 1 length at 1200 meters, but many would disagree with this figure and perhaps it is a bit out of date. Many say that there should be a sliding scale for various distances, the logic being that it’s harder to carry 1kg over a longer distance than over the shorter distances. I think that those proponents of this theory have forgotten their physics which shows that energy is derived from both mass and speed, therefore since longer races are run at a slower speed require less energy for the same mass.

Any Thoughts on this topic?

Kind Regards

CairnsMan

Read somewhere that a second is equivalent to around 2.7 lengths
So if that was near correct, 0.58 seconds is around 1.56 lengths
Around 2.34 kg in weight

Hi Sands,

A 1200 meter race run in 71 seconds would mean that the horse is traveling at average of 16.9 m/sec.

Given that a length is 8ft (2.438 meters) then one length would be about 0.14 seconds...

so if 2.7 lengths = 1 second then a 71 second race would be 191.7 lths long or about (191 X 2.4m). Less than 500 meters..

Thanks for your input, but I suggest you've been misled..

CairnsMan

Been a while since I read the article CairnsMan, so most likely a memory error
I recall there was also some reference to the last 600m sectionals but like I said been a while since I read

I've always understood that 1 second = 6 lengths but as Sands said it could be a memory error.

Depending on your info source, I think you'll find that 6-7 lens is generally considered to equal 1 second in race time