These photo-finish companies are ridiculous with the way they guard the \"super-secret\" formula to figure out how many lengths a horse was beaten by.

BTW, both time and beaten lengths are available for quarter horses and I think that may be the key to reverse engineering what they are doing.  I looked at the relationship briefly last week but came up empty.  If you don\'t get any solid answers from them, I\'ll take a harder look when I get a chance.

Thanks for remembering.  I\'m looking forward to reading what new information comes out of this.

I\'m right there with you beyerguy.  If you\'re watching the 100 meters in the Olympics they don\'t just give you the winner\'s time and then tell you all the other times are proprietary.

Thanks for the tracks beyerguy.  I just checked out the DRF pages for each - Kentucky Downs has a real strange shape.

I emailed the people at Teletimer and asked how to take lengths-behind back to time.  They told me there methods are proprietary.

Any one know of any non-oval tracks in the US?

I thought they were reading photos like this:

http://www.aro.co.za/news/PRIXDUCAPPHOTOFINISH2003.JPG

It looks like a still when the winner crossed the line but it\'s actually the photo finish camera that catches each horse when they hit the wire.  There is no shutter on the camera - it just taking pictures of what is passing by a very small area at the finish line.

I have an online account with Equibase and emailed a guy named Matthew that works in Ebusiness.  He asked someone in Operations my question and emailed me back saying that there is no simple answer.  I don\'t know who it was in Operations that he spoke with.

That\'s interesting that they buy the data from photo finish companies.  Hopefully they\'re all trained to read the and translate the photos the same way.  Obviously it would be better if Equibase could just buy the photos and have their own people read them but that would be more costly.

BTW, if I\'m right about them doing it that way it\'s still pretty simple to figure out a horses finishing time as long as you know how many feet they use for a length.

My initial question was very simple cause I thought the answer was simple.  When I was growing up my dad taught me to read the racing form and he said the way to convert lengths back to time behind was to use 1/5th of second per length - I assumed that was close to how it was done so I didn\'t get more specific with my question.

Later I emailed Equibase asking them my question of how to convert beaten lengths to actual finish times.  I figured they would say it\'s either 1/5th or 1/6th of a second per length.  The answer I actually got was that there was no simple way to do the conversion.  After hearing that, I knew the solution couldn\'t be using 1/5th or 1/6th.

At this point, what I assume they are doing is taking the finish times of non-winners, determining the rate of speed each ran at, using the rate to figure out how far they would have run when the winner crossed the wire, and then convert that distance into lengths.

I don\'t recall ever posting here.  I\'ve been a casual reader of the boards for a long time but just got a login to post with.

Did you just read Andy Grove\'s Only the Paranoid Survive or something?

asfufh - You are correct.  Finishing places are determined by the order of the horses when each hits the wire not the order they are in when the winner crosses the line.  Equibase knows the time for each horse but does not publish it - they use it to calculate lengths beaten.  What I want to know is how to take lengths beaten and go back to the actual time.

I contacted Equibase and they said there is no easy way to calculate the non-winner\'s times.  I take this to mean that the time/length they use varies based on distance or may even be more complicated by using the running speed of the horses to get a decent approximation of their time/length.

Jerry - I\'m curious if you heard anything different.  The way they are calculating this would be important to making figures because if they are using a constant time/length (even if it\'s changed for each distance) it would be misleading if non-winning horses were running faster or slower than that constant.  My guess is that they are adjusting the time/length based on the speed the race is run in (e.g. t/l would be different for a 1:33 mile vs a 1:38 mile) but I just wanted to find out for certain.

Ok thanks TGJB.  What I\'m really looking to do is glance at the results (for any distance) and be able to make a pretty accurate estimation of what time a non-winning horse ran.

So if the winner of a six furlong race ran 1:09 and won by five lengths (according to the PPs) - the second place horse crossed the line in 1:10?

I\'m trying to understand how DRF and Equibase come up with a lengths beaten number.

I\'ve seen finish line photos with a time strip up at the top.  I know they use one-fifth of a second is equal to one length.  So if a horse loses by 5 lengths according to them, are they saying he was one second behind the winner according to the time strip and we think that equals five lengths or are they saying that the horse lost by five lengths because that is what we measured?