Q. Are there differences in the way you make figures for dirt and turf? – Bob Edmonds A. Yes, because races are run differently on the two surfaces. In U.S. dirt races, horses have traditionally run hard from start to finish. In turf racing around the world, jockeys typically put their mounts under greater early restraint and don’t turn them loose until the stretch. The result is often a tightly bunched finish. In the last two runnings of the Breeders’ Cup Mile, the top 10 finishers were separated by only three lengths. Such a result on dirt would be almost unheard of. We could conclude that three lengths is a more significant margin in a grass race than on dirt. And in 2015, we revised our turf calculations to reflect this difference. For turf races, we modified the chart that underlies our dirt figures so that every one-tenth of a second would have a slightly higher value on grass than on dirt. It’s not a change that readers would notice, but it is significant when applied to margins of one or two full seconds. When the pace of a turf race is exceptionally slow, it creates difficulty for anyone who makes speed figures. If a field of turfers is capable of running a one-mile race in 1:35 but plods through the first six furlongs in 1:14, they will not be able to accelerate fast enough in the final quarter to record a meaningful final time. If these horses normally run figures of 90 but their final time translated to a speed figure of 70, that figure would be useless. We deal with these situations by assigning the race a figure that reflects the ability of the field – in this example, somewhere around 90 – but there is no ideal answer to dealing with slowly paced grass races. In one respect, we have made our turf figures more like those for dirt. U.S. horses have historically been bred for dirt and trained for dirt, and the quality of dirt races has been superior to those on grass. Our speed figures reflected that fact. But in recent years, U.S. tracks have put a much greater emphasis on grass, and the improved quality of these races is evident. When Belmont Park cards a bottom-level allowance race on grass, it will typically draw a full field of horses trained by turf experts such as Chad Brown, Christophe Clement, and Bill Mott. In no way are these races inferior to their dirt counterparts. When we revised our turf figures in 2015, we did so in a way that made them comparable to dirt. The average winning figure in an N1X allowance race at Belmont is a 92; on dirt, it is a 92. Superstar dirt horses still earn higher figures than the best turfers, but otherwise, turf runners have achieved parity. – Andrew Beyer