Hi All,

I spent most of last night and much of today pondering over Sectional Times data for several races.
I got the data free from the web and it shows both the time taken to travel a distance and the time in
seconds to travel each 200m segment for each runner….

I had to refer to results to get some beaten margin lengths but overall came up with the following conclusions,

It is possible to look at all runners as a group and then calculate the Speed in Meters/Sec for each runner and
taking the lowest time for the section (the leaders time) determine the distance traveled by each other runner
in the leaders time for that segment…

This is done by first determining the runners speed in mps by dividing 200m
by the runner’s time e.g. 200m / 12sec = 16.66 Meters per second.

You then multiply each other runners speed by the leader’s time and you can determine how far they had run
when the leader went past the 200m sensor. e.g if the second runners speed was 16.35 mps then they would
have run 16.35 X 12 = 196.20 meters, or be 3.8 meters behind the leader.

You can calculate this out for each segment, add them all up and it generally agrees with finishing margins
posted in the results.

In doing the experiments I found that there are lots of slight variations in figures, due I think to the fact that the runners
were not running in a perfect line but shifting across the track etc…

Having done all that work on several races I settled back and asked “What’s it all mean?”….

My Conclusion? --- Absolutely Nothing! At least nothing that I didn’t already know…

You can see in the data the relative positions of the runners and when an unfit horse gave out.

You can also pick when an unplaced runner ran a good race toward the end.

So what have I learned from this exercise? Pretty much nothing new! Certainly not what I was searching for.
A way to produce a figure relative to a horse’s performance that could be used like a class-weight rating showing
the relative strength of a runner. A figure that shows an advantage over another runner…..

My final word for now on it…..

Sectional Times, displayed in segments of 200m, as I have seen them, simply have no real worth on their own,
but combined as a tool to confirm your existing Class Weight Ratings or used in conjunction with video footage or an audio
replay they powerfully reinforce your race and runner assessments.

Please feel free to agree or disagree...

Kind Regards

OzPunter