I have been doing my own ratings for a long time and have often changed things to make them easier to work with...i don't price the selections just work out top rated and so on but recently i had to make same changes after having good results for months....have you ever wondered what the biggest obsticle is in horse form, CLASS i would have to say this is the down fall of everyone that rates horses how can you totaly estimate the class of a horse....form is easy to decipher win and place percentages are there in front of you, track and distance performances are easy to find but working out how all these things relate from one horse to another is not so easy....some use API some say this is a little unreliable but it is pretty accurate most of the times and can be the difference between finding a winner and not,,,,we could use a weight rating chart like Don Scotts or we could just look at all the race classes that are listed and allocate our own rating for each class.....or we could use the the prize money of the race as a guide, but can this be relied on to be accurate all over the country.....i am interested in how you rate class in a race and how many factors do you consider important in your ratings.....can you rate a race with say 3 factors for example (beaten margins,win%,API ranking) or do you need 10,20 or even 30 factors covering everyhting from what the jockey ate for breakfast to when the horse took it's last dump........and do you think the results are any better using the first example or the second.