Ask Beyer: Track variant measures inherent speed of the racing surface.

Q. My understanding of how speed figures are calculated is that the times of all races for the day are compared to the par of average times of races at the track for those levels.

If 7 of 9 races on a card are run faster than average, the track surface will be considered very fast. But isn’t it possible that the horses happened to be of higher quality on that day?

– Samuel Dudorich.

A. Some speed figures are calculated in the way you describe. Not ours. I did rely on pars when I was developing the figures in the early 1970s but quickly saw that this was a flawed approach – for the reason you cited. If the par for a race is 70, and three horses in the field have recently run figures around 70, but one of them wins the race by five lengths, do we expect him to earn a figure of 70? No. If the race was at six furlongs, where five lengths equal 12 points, the winner might reasonably have improved enough to run an 82.

We analyze every race by examining how the horses finished, how many Beyer points separated them, and what figures they had earned in their recent starts. Then we ask: “What winning figure for this race would be most consistent with the previous form of the top finishers?” The answer to that question is what we call our projection for the race. We compare the projection with the result of each race on a card. The average difference between the projection and the result is the basis of our track variant – the number that measures the inherent speed of the racing surface.

– Andrew Beyer