2011 Kentucky Derby: Raw times by contenders

I received an email from one of our readers the other day (Swale), curious as to the best times by the three-year-old Derby contenders this winter/spring at distances of a mile or greater.  While speed figures provide us with a nice way to compare performances of horses from race-to-race and track-to-track, sometimes its helpful to look at raw times to get a clue as to how the figure makers viewed different races, or just to compare at a high level.

(As a side note: If there is anything you're ever interested in seeing posted on the site, just drop me a line and I'll try to get something up about it.  I can't guarantee that I'll always be able to oblige, but I'll certainly try.)

I've attached an Excel file below that summarizes the winning times since last fall for many of the Triple Crown nominated horses.  I didn't include every winning time due to the fact that some are not relevant.  The races I included are:

-Winning races,
-Non-maiden,
-Non-state bred,
-At one mile, or longer,
-On the main track (this included races over synthetic surfaces).

Stated another way: no clockings from turf races, maidens, sprints, state-bred, or non-winning races were included.  

2011 Kentucky Derby - Raw Times

I left blank the fractional splits for each horse as I am going to go back through the Formulator charts and pull the individual splits for each winner.  That will take a bit of extra time but should also give some additional clues about the conditions under which these times occurred.  Additionally, I'm going to add two extra columns for the Beyer and Bris speed figures at a later time, something that should illustrate which times took place on a "slow" or "fast" surface, at least according to the figure makers.

While raw times are a function of the relative speed of a specific track, I think it's quite interesting as to the horses that clocked the fastest times at each distance.

1 Mile: Uncle Mo
1 Mile + 70yds: Rescind The Trade
1 1/16 Miles: Uncle Mo
1 1/8 Miles: Anthony's Cross

Uncle Mo doesn't surprise us as he was clearly the fastest juvenile in the crop last fall, and Anthony's Cross has the fastest 9 furlong time so far this spring, and that's not really a shocker considering the autobahn at Santa Anita.