Hi Martin, I don't want to hijack EC's thread, and others may have different opinions to my own, however.....
If a section were taken every yard, that would be ideal, as the data could be plotted on a graph and it would show all of the injections and steadying of pace. What we have instead is blocks of data, determined by either turftrax at Lingfield using furlong blocks, or from our own reference points. So it's all a bit chunky, but still a great tool to use.
Regarding the best section to use. I can't really speak about NH racing, as I don't follow it. On the flat though, the last couple of sections are the most telling, and assume it's likely the same for NH racing. On the flat, if middle distance runners are finishing faster than sprinters on the same card, then it's pretty obvious the sprinters went too hard to achieve an optimum overall time. They may still have clocked well, just not as well as they could have done.
So by looking at final sections of the races at a meeting, it can help to identify optical illusions, where something 'looks' to have finished with a wet sail, but actually spent it's energy more wisely during the race was able to run out a normal finish while most in the race became one paced/slowed. They can also identify which horses really did finish fast.
They aren't fool proof, but do significantly improve your understanding of how a race was run when comparing with other races at the meeting, therefore improving your overall SF's for the meeting. I feel the benefit is from not following horses which you may have otherwise perceived as being fast (enabling you to sometimes rate an entire meeting as being slow), and what is left as being fast, you can be a lot more confident that they were.
