Because it took me a fair amount of research to figure this out, I thought I would post it here. Handicap races have conditions that stipulate the max and min weights permitted. Runners' weights are calculated by equating the top rated runner to the top race condition weight, then laddering down pro rata by rating for all other runners. Occasionally one of more of the lowest rated runners will warrant a ratings based weight below the minimum for the race, but due to race conditions stipulating a minimum permitted weight, they will end up carrying additional weight. Such runners are described as running "out of the handicap". In SmartForm terms, the rating is "official_rating" and the weight carried is "weight_pounds". Matters are complicated by ratings changes which are published every Tuesday morning and take effect the following Saturday. Runners that won a recent prior race may have an interim penalty weight applied to their rating until the full amount of the handicapper assessment takes effect. In SmartForm terms this is "weight_penalty" which should be added to "official rating" to calculate the penalised weighting which is in turn used to calculate the weight carried. Note that SmartForm contains a field called "adjusted_weighting" but this seems not to correspond usefully with either original official rating, penalised rating, or the handicapper reassessed rating yet to take effect.
Therefore my question is - What is "adjusted_rating" ?
Example of the above:
For example today (27 Nov 2019) in the Kempton 16:40, top weight SummerOnSevenHills has official_rating plus weight_penalty reported by SmartForm as 76 carrying lbs 135 - a correction delta of 59. The next listed runner Can't Stop Now has official_rating 74 carrying lbs 133 : both two less. Note that SummerOnSevenHills won 8 days ago and yesterday a reassessed rating of 82 was published and will take effect on Saturday. Meanwhile a lbs 6 penalty is added to the original OR of 70. Bottom rated runner Power Of Love has a rating 45 carrying the race minimum lbs 112. If fully handicapped per rating it should be carrying 45 + 59 = 104. Therefore it is running lbs 8 "out of the handicap".
