Kentucky Derby 2013: The Road to Louisville - Part III

First things first, I've updated (somewhat) the Google Drive file containing the top four finishers in the official Derby preps and some of the non-official races. I still need to update some of the beaten lengths data but I'll get around to it eventually.

2013 Road to the Kentucky Derby

Here is some reference data that I've pulled out of the Google Drive document with regards to the published figures for the winners of Derby preps so far. And I suppose I should delineate between the "official" Derby preps, or races that have points attached to them, and the "unofficial" preps, which under my definition is pretty much any race at a mile or greater that I've included on the linked spreadsheet.

The list of figures below includes both the official and unofficial races for 2yo and 3yos. I don't have figures for every race, so this is simply a ranking of the winner's figures that are included in the spreadsheet. Additionally, a top non-winning performance, i.e. a runner-up that runs a better figures than many of the winners - like Shanghai Bobby in last week's Holy Bull - aren't yet included. I'm in the process of putting that analysis together in the next few weeks.

A quick rundown of the references:

• Beyer figures from the Daily Racing Form Stakes Results page.
• Bris figures from their Handicapper's Edge page.
• Equibase figures from their Stakes Results page.
• Performance Figures from the Chef de Race website
• And Racing Post Ratings from... well, the Racing Post.

All right, so here where we stand in terms of Top 3 performances from a purely figure perspective if we are looking just at the winners:

The races are rated fairly consistently across all of the figure makers, with the exception of the Racing Post Rating, which are included more as an FYI rather than a heavily relied upon number. The RPR's do a good job with European races and races on the turf, but personally they don't carry a ton of weight with me when we start talking about dirt races simply due to the inherent differences in American dirt racing and European grass racing. Plus, an RPR isn't a speed rating as much as it's a weight/handicap rating. But, I think they are still interesting to compare in terms of relative ranking of individual performances.

Anyway, beyond the RPR's all the systems agree that the Remsen and the Holy Bull are two of the best winning performances from this 3yo crop (so far). The Gulfstream Park Derby rates highly on Beyer, Bris and Equibase, but not as highly on the Performance Figure scale. Additionally, Equibase the Chef de Race Performance Figure is the only system to rate Oxbow's Lecomte win as one of the top three winning performances from this group of selected races.

And finally, I've put together a chart that breaks down each prep by circuit, along with the corresponding points for each race. This provides a bit of a high level view of where the point opportunities are in each region of the country over the next three months.