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Indiana Downs opened their race meet today. They typically run a QH race or 2 at the end of their card. I watched the QH finale today, and noticed that they had the Trakus chicklets at the bottom of the screen during the race. I liked that view. Instead of fighting the camera angle to try to read who is winning, the chicklet view made it easy to see who the leaders were. I have never seen a QH race that had Trakus coverage.
But I think the real potential for Trakus is on the Indy Downs website. This race was a 300 yard race. Trakus had a checkpoint after the first 80 yards (220 yards from the wire), another checkpoint after 190 yards (so this checkpoint measured 110 yards, stopping 110 from the wire), and a final checkpoint at the finish line.
The positives:
- Trakus shows the total number of feet travelled during the race by each runner. So instead of simply observing that a horse lugged out, and calculating an estimated time loss, you could use Trakus to see exactly how many extra feet a horse ran, and derive a much more accurate estimate of how much time was lost. In today's race, the winner lugged in, and Trakus shows that the winner ran about 3 or 4 feet further than most of the field.
- Trakus shows individual horse's running splits for each segment of the race. At Los Al, they announce what the time was for the final 220 yards. With Trakus, you can actually see how fast EACH horse started and finished the race.
There are some quirks though, and the measurements are probably not 100% reliable. In today's race, Trakus shows that the winning horse ran 15.96, while the official Equibase time of the winner was 15.69. Trakus was consistently slower than the Equibase official times by about .24. Trakus also shows that the horses all travelled appx 250 feet (83.3 yards) in the first 80 yards of the race. Much of that is a natural offset - the trakus devices are placed in the saddle towel, which is obviously about half a length (5 or 6 feet?) behind the horse's nose. So even if the race is 300 yards, the trakus chip probably travels about 302 yards before it crosses the wire.
My general observation of Trakus at other tracks such as Del Mar is that it will occasionally show some stats that are hard to believe, and I don't think the times and distances travelled are always accurate.
But I do think that in a sport where races frequently come down to thousandths of a second, Trakus has potential to be a very strong handicapping tool, and I wonder if any other tracks that run QHs will adopt Trakus.