A couple of turf stakes at Arlington on Saturday that featured drastically different pace scenarios serve as great examples to demonstrate how our pace-infused speed figures work. In each case, the winner did not earn the best TFUS speed figure in the race.

The 7th race was the Grade 3 Arlington Handicap, and it was a paceless affair.  Avanzare was allowed to canter through opening fractions of 26.36 / 26.41 before picking up the pace to 24.87 / 24.64 to the mile.  Finnegans Wake ($13.20), despite his designation as being a ‘plodder’ based on his past races, changed tactics to stalk the leader in second, and then sprinted home in 22.99 to get the nod by a head over Admiral Kitten.  However, since the latter closed squarely against the pace grain from dead last, he got the best figure in the race. Here’s the race chart.

Admiral Kitten’s figure was upgraded from a raw final time figure of 105.

Two races later, in the Grade 3 American Derby, for 3YOs at the slightly shorter distance of a mile and 3/16ths, it was a completely different story.  Longshot Ghostly Wonder zipped to the lead in an opening quarter of 23.60 with the British shipper Our Channel in hot pursuit.  From there, the race slowed to essentially a flat 25 second pace.  Our Channel battled on gamely but was unable to hold off the closing Divine Oath ($9.20). Small consolation to the British invader I’m sure, but Our Channel earned the better TFUS speed figure for his efforts; and note that 4th place finisher Schoolofhardrocks was also rewarded for being close to the early pace.  So, in this case, it was the horses in front early on who got the extra credit in the figures.

More information on how we make our speed figures can be found here.

Also wanted to point out that you can now read the complete chart footnotes by clicking on the cleverly-named Footnote button.

Divine Oath, winning his first stakes race, for Pletcher, is a son of Broken Vow whose third dam is the legendary Personal Ensign.  His best prior effort was a second place finish in the Lexington Stakes, the last-chance Derby points race run on the Poly (for the last time this year) at Keeneland.  That has turned out to be a productive race, if not actually for the Kentucky Derby nor any other dirt races, as one can see by looking at the subsequent races in our ‘continuum’ of race results.

Mr. Speaker, after a miserable effort in his next race, bounced back to upset the Grade 1 Belmont Derby on July 5.  And Ami’s Holiday came back with two strong seconds, most recently a tough luck second after an extremely eventful trip in the Grade 1 Queen’s Plate on July 6.  And remember, by clicking on any of the continuum squares, you will be brought to the full result chart of that race; and so on….  More information on TimeformUS Result Charts can be found here.

– For those of you planning to visit Saratoga, we will be giving away a pair of grandstand seats almost every day of the meet!  More details on that here.

Also, don’t forget our irresistible summer specials in which we are selling TimeformUS PPs ridiculously cheap, thus driving our controller crazy.

The PPs are already available for Thursday and Friday’s cards at Del Mar.  Right now, you can get FREE PPs for the opening day Oceanside Stakes; as well as for the 6th race on Friday, a stakes-quality turf sprint allowance race.