daily and hist dust in yards differ !! ?

Question

Why does dist in yards differ in daily_races and historic_races, eg Brighton same published dist in miles and frlng is 2618 and 2616 throws my analysis out ?

Answer 1

Don't know how back you're going into the historical data but maybe 6 or 7 years ago there was a major distance remeasurement programme across all GB tracks.

Distance that hadn't been that precise to start with (typically rounded to the nearest half furlong back in the day) were remeasured using some proper 21st century kit, current rail alignments, standard measurement rules (i.e. racing line distance from rail) and so on.

This led to race distances at a lot of courses being restated without any actual on-the-ground change. Some reported distances changed by 30 or 40 yards, from memory.

Comments

Thanks, I’m working on net handicap marks over course and distance over the last 2 years using a match on course(of course!) and ‘distance yards’ and at some courses e.g. Beverley and Brighton. A race, say 1m 113yds(which should be 1873yds) will be correct on the daily races record but could be 1875yds on the historic(within 2 years) record which obviously causes a mismatch therefore, as above, I’ve put in a 5% allowance variable to gain ‘accurate’ analysis.... thanks for your reply it’s appreciated.

Answer 2

Forecast distance from cards in advance of racing is usually but not always the same as distance reported.  One way to handle this if you want to join by distance between historic and daily cards is to divide the distance in yards by furlongs and round to a decimal place.

Thus in R:

round(2618/220, digits = 1)

round(2616/220, digits = 1)

Both return 11.9 furlongs.