Pick a track, any track.  Get a stack of Forms or other data source from last season or a good portion of this one.  Paying no attention to times or surface, make a list of every “Class” of race run at that track.

At cheaper tracks, the list will be relatively short.  There may be no graded races at all, and claiming and allowance conditions may be straightforward and simple.  At other tracks, depending upon the inclination of the managers and/or Racing Secretary, conditions can be very complicated, and very situational, sometimes written for a particular handful of horses the Secretary knows is waiting around in the barns.

After you have written down every different set of conditions for races at the track, put them in order from “highest Class” to “lowest Class.”

Here you will run into a couple of the oldest debates in horseracing:  "What is 'Class?'” and “Is Class Speed?”

For now, ignore the times recorded for the races and deal only with written conditions.  You will find that there are still numerous decisions you have to make to rank the Classes in order, even at a cheap track.  Is purse value the common denominator of all racing?  If so, is an Allowance $4,200 N2 higher or lower in “Class” than a Clm $5,000 N3 at the same purse value?

As someone who used to help haul losing horses to the track to run in Allowance races because they were pets, I can suggest that Allowance races should not automatically be listed above Claiming at the same or similar purse values.

The reason this exercise is interesting is that you will find that you will have to make some arbitrary calls simply to arrange the Classes in any kind of ranked order.  Ranking the Classes of races run at a track is the first step in making speed figures in any Beyer-like approach, which uses Class-Par-Times.

Once you make the list and end up with something like last week’s Class tables for the entire track, the traditional next step is to make a new table for each distance using the entire Class ranking (separating dirt and turf, and two-year-old and three-year-old races), and go back through the race results, marking down final times run within each Class.  You then average the times recorded for each Class as the first step in establishing Class-Pars. 

If you follow the traditional approach, this is where you start “fudging.”  The fundamental, preconceived notion is that “higher Class” horses must run faster.  You now have as many as twenty-five racing Classes for which to fill in Class-Par-Times at each racing distance, and they must stair-step down in speed from fastest to slowest.  Say you’ve decided that an Allowance Class is higher than a certain level Claimer, but there are only three Allowance times to average for 7 furlongs on the turf and none for the Claimers—what do you do?  You force the Allowance time to be 1/5th slower than its predecessor, and you make up a time that is proportionately lower for the Claimers, which have never, and may never, run the distance.

As I said early on, the great value of the original Beyer approach was that is was "do-it-yourself."  If you do the work, you cannot help but learn a great deal about times and running conditions at a track.  It is hard to separate which is more valuable to your ultimate profit—the learning, or the figures.  If you are going to do this, I’d suggest a couple of steps to make the resulting speed figures more valuable, and at the same time, a little exercise that should give you pause over the whole Class-Par-Time concept.

Since you are reading this over the Internet, you almost certainly have a spreadsheet.  Go back to the hypothetical exercise at the top and this time really do it, listing the Classes of races in one column of a spreadsheet table.

Make a heading for each distance on the dirt and turf, and under each one—without worrying about Class order—list only the Classes of races run at that distance and surface, leaving them in whatever order they occurred chronologically. Then, enter every time recorded on a fast track for that Class and distance, and write a little formula to average them in the last column.  You don’t have to be a geek to do this; most spreadsheets have built-in formulae, which make this very easy.

This may sound like a bigger task than you want to bite off—and doing an entire track history is work—but if you want to have an interesting hour or so, try it for just a couple of moderately run distances at one of your favorite tracks.

Your spreadsheet should look something like this (abbreviated for space and not all Classes and times shown):

Distance: 5.5 Furlongs      Surface: Dirt

Class (random order)				Average Time
Clm $6.25K	65.2	63.4	65.2	64.3
Alw  NW 1	64.8	62.4	63.6	63.6
Clm $4K	63.6	63.1	64.2	63.4
Mdn Spc Wt	62.4	64.2	63.0	63.0

One of the first things you should notice while entering numbers, even in small samples, is that times within the Classes overlap.  You will also find that for many cases, only a few Classes actually run the distance, and when they do, there may be only a small number of races each season.

In all situations, wild-flyer times (fast or slow) are usually not uncommon.  The conventional wisdom is to throw out flyers, but the computer doesn’t know that and, for this exercise, let the chips fall where they may—leave them in.

Now, for the moment of truth.  This was very difficult to visualize with the pencil-and-paper technology that originated these methods, but it now just takes a couple of clicks of a mouse button: Sort the table by the 'average time' column on the right.

Sometimes sorting from fastest to slowest times will rearrange the rows such that the "Class" column makes pretty fair sense. You might hit one of these cases.  At least as often, however, the order of “Class” will be about as garbled as it was at random to begin with.  Other times, there will be a general trend indicating that the highest Class will run faster than the rock-bottom lowest Class—with a bizarre mix of Classes in between.  So, what does this tell you about neatly stair-stepping Class-Par-Times, where every arbitrarily ranked racing “Class” runs a fifth-of-a-second slower than the previous one?

If you want to take this beyond just an interesting exercise and actually make the foundation Class-Pars for improving upon the method, the next step is to break with tradition and either lump Classes, or accept the unconventional hierarchy.

Suppose “Maiden Special Weight” turns up the fastest Class on the track at some seldom-run distance?  Should you follow tradition—throw out the data—and give it an artificial time to force it into the hierarchy pattern for the track as a whole?

Two factors could be operating to make it appear to be the fastest Class.  First of all, maybe it is the fastest Class.  Or, it could be a function of flukes and flyers.  If you can recognize a true pattern, or the absence of a true pattern, you will make better speed figures and variants if you follow the advice of the great eastern philosopher Chong (Tommy) and “go with it.” Let the upside-down Classes stand—or, if there is no valid pattern, lump them into several, or even one group, and simply use one or two times as pars for the distance.  This creates a very complicated scheme for comparing speed figures across distances, but it can be done.

[The approach that I use makes all of these issues moot, but the purpose here is to look into the figures the public is using and understand where “art” and errors enter—as well as how you could improve on them for yourself, if you wish.]

If you want to make your own, improved, Beyer-like figures, first, do not make a blanket Class hierarchy for a track. Do not apply a single such hierarchy to every dirt and turf distance, and do not make up numbers to fill in unraced Classes or change numbers to fit preconceived Class notions.  Let the actual data shape both the Classes and the pars.

I haven’t done this recently, but suspect that if you plotted the times for all races at a heavily run distance like 6f, they would still form a bell-shaped curve of times, with a similar distribution of Classes within it.  What you may find, based purely upon times run, is there may actually be only three “Classes” of racehorses at many distances on many tracks:

Elite Runners
Journeymen
Hunter-Jumper (Alpo) Prospects

For "Class" purposes, I'm always tempted to add a fourth group of "Novices"—two- and three-year-olds, whose times tend to scatter all over at least the bottom two, but therefore, by definition, they don't represent a true division of speed.