Kentucky Derby 2013: The Road to Louisville

We are a little under six months away from the 2013 Kentucky Derby and only a couple of months away from the beginning of the stakes calendar for three-year-old colts at various tracks around the country. Yes, Kentucky Derby time is slowly creeping onto the horizon.

This year's road to the Derby is significantly different from previous years following the changes introduced by Churchill Downs to the qualifying process. Gone are the days of graded stakes earnings and horses automatically earning a spot in the starting gate through a victory in a single $1 million race. Now horses will earn points on specific races and the points will change depending on how close or how far away the race is from the Derby itself. The $1 million Delta Jackpot, and the $2 million Breeders' Cup Juvenile, once races that guaranteed enough money to make the Derby field, are now merely early steps in that direction.

[We had a post discussing the pros and cons of the new system following it's release earlier this year.]

Below is a summary of the new road to the Derby schedule, along with the points allocated to each race along the way.

Any dates in the table with a "?" next to them means I'm guessing at the day based on the 2012 scheduling; some tracks (like Aqueduct and Keeneland) have yet to release their 2013 stakes calendar.

You might remember that a couple of years ago I put together a spreadsheet tracking the all of the 3yo stakes races at a mile or greater in the month leading up to the Derby. I wasn't able to do that last year due to other distraction, but I'm happy to bring back that spreadsheet for 2013. Below is the link to the spreadsheet via Google Drive:

2013 Road to the Kentucky Derby Tracker (Google Drive)

UPDATE: Okay, so there is a problem with the splits on the Google Drive doc; essentially, Google spreadsheets don't allow you to display numbers in a customized Excel format (which is what I did on the original file). So, until I hard key those to look better it will look ugly.

For a better view of the splits, I uploaded the spreadsheet as an SB Nation asset. You can view it through the link below.

2013 Road to the Derby Tracker (SB Nation Asset)

A couple of things with the Derby Tracker:

• As you can see, there is some data I'm still in the process of filling in; Christmas will be a good time to get all this caught up.
• I am including some races that aren't part of the official Churchill Downs Derby prep standings. Essentially, I am including any graded or ungraded stakes race at a mile or greater on the main track at a major race meeting (or a race at a smaller track that produces a very big performance).
• Under the "Points" column, any race not part of the Churchill Downs official road to the Derby series is marked as "n/a".
• The tracker includes the top four finishers in each race, along with their Beyer, Bris and Equibase figures, and the performance figures from Chef de Race, when available. (I've haven't added in the PFs as of yet, but should have them all updated in the next week or so.)
• I've included the fractions and internal splits for each of the top four horses and noted where those numbers are taken from. Most of the time the data is from either Trakus or the DRF Formulator Interactive Charts. I attempt to use Trakus data if it's available.