Renumbering of Stalls and Historical Data

Question

OK So I have been away a few years and have a number of questions now that I have resubscribed so apologies as many of these may have been answered elsewhere previously.

A few years back they decided to renumber the stalls so that there is now uniformity across all courses so that the low numbers are now always on the inside of the track

Have the stalls numbers been reallocated/reassigned in the historical data?

Also does anyone recall the date the changeover took place to standardise the numbering

Answer 1

This happened in 2011 in England and Ireland.  But only for right handed courses - left handed courses already had low numbers on the inside.

Here's a couple of links that explain everything:

UK:

https://www.britishhorseracing.com/press_releases/revised-stalls-numbering-to-take-effect-from-wednesday-30th-march-2011/

Ireland:

http://www.irishracing.com/v5newsitem?prid=52205

With regard to Smartform, we publish the actual stall positions, not the normalized ones.  If you want to do a reversal of stalls before the Flat season in 2011 (which if you're looking at draw bias would indeed be the correct thing to do), you have to reverse the positions on right handed courses yourself.

This is an important point about Smartform - the data is the data.  Interpretation, derived statistics and so forth are all possible through SQL and programming transformations, but we don't do that for you.  This means you can treat the data as you wish, and the correct treatment is usually to create new tables outside the Smartform main tables that contain such transformations or derived variables.  

One more word on draw bias though - it's questionable how much value going back more than 5 years is to today's draw bias.  So many things change on a racetrack - watering, rails position, position of stalls on the course, camber (which has altered the bias at Beverley), and on all weather even the composition of the surface, that - with the exception of "obvious" course configuration biases like Chester - recent records of positions and results are usually more important.