Championship Series Brisnet Speed Ratings 1990 – 2014

By Dana Byerly

This is a great time of year if you enjoy a never-ending stream of statistical, and not-so-statistical, analysis. There’s no shortage handicapping rumination in the weeks leading up to the Kentucky Derby. This post is not designed to offer any such analysis or rumination, but rather to offer you some tools to do your own, if you feel so inclined.

You may remember back in March when we added the whopper Brisnet Speed and Class Ratings 1990-2014 over at Horse Racing Datasets. At the time we created a few different tabbed views of the data, including the Triple Crown races, but given the size of the dataset we opted not to create an additional tab for the Derby preps.

Now that the Derby is upon us, it seemed like a great time to compile the Kentucky Derby prep races for ease of use. We used the races that comprise today’s Championship Series and in the cases where a race was run in the divisions we used the higher of the two numbers. A few other program notes: The Sunland Derby started in 2006, the Louisiana Derby was not run in 2006 and we don’t a fig for the 1990 Risen Star, even though the race was run in that year.

For chart viewing ease we broke the races out into two segments, the 50 point races and the 100 point races. We also included the Kentucky Derby in both charts for comparison.

Brisnet Speed Ratings – Kentucky Derby Championship Series
50 Point Races – 1990-2014

You can copy the data directly out of the embedded document below or visit the tabbed Google Sheet, which includes an interactive version of the above chart.

Brisnet Speed Ratings – Kentucky Derby Championship Series
100 Point Races – 1990-2014

You can copy the data directly out of the embedded document below or visit the tabbed Google Sheet, which includes an interactive version of the above chart.

If you’d like to grab the full data for the races listed above, you can do so here. There’s also a tab for an interactive chart of the full Championship Series of races, but be warned, it’s pretty busy.

Given that TimeformUS shared their figs for the Derby preps going back five years and that Jessica Chapel has been compiling information about the Derby preps that includes Beyer Speed Figures, we put together this a spreadsheet that includes Beyer Speed Figures, Brisnet Speed Ratings and TimeformUS Speed Figures for the major final preps going back five years. The races include the Arkansas Derby, Blue Grass, Florida Derby, Louisiana Derby, Santa Anita Derby and the Wood Memorial. The groupings by race are color coded to correspond to the bar colors used in the chart above. It’s too big to embed, but you can view it here. A big hanks to TimeformUS and Chapel for sharing their work!

There you have it. Grab the data and plug it in to any Derby database or handicapping methodology you already have, or use it to get started! Be sure to check out Jessica Chapel’s “Geek Out! Mining Derby Data” post over at Hello Race Fans, our sister site, if you’re looking to get started with your Derby handicapping methodology. Also at Hello Race Fans, we’ll have our annual posts on Going the Derby Distance and Derby Running Styles during Derby week.