You're probably all familiar with traditional past performances. Horse's name, limited lineage, jockey, trainer and earnings information, and previous races back usually to 10 races. It's all the information.

But can you glean what you need? I have my own program, so (pardon my arrogance) my past performances are some of the best around. Everything is color coded, neatly layed out. I even mesh the workouts with the races in chronological order. I use days instead of dates so I don't have to compute the days. I get only very limited usage. Probably the most useful aspect is the workouts meshed with the races, but most people don't have access to that feature. The works are usually listed on one or two horizontal lines below the race lines. So, what do I glean from my beautiful past performances? Not much.

The biggest problem with past performances is that they deal with one horse at a time. There is no visual for comparisons among horses. When Huey Mahl said that Pace Makes the Race, he clearly did not have in mind looking at one horse at a time, though a very intelligent person might be able to do it. But why? Why struggle through one horse at a time?

When I first started getting digital race data, over 25 years ago, my first thought was that I wanted to view the data TOGETHER. If I am looking at jockey data, I don't get a visual of which jockey is best by looking at the jockey of one horse. I needed to see all of the jockeys together because looking one at a time was very taxing on the brain, slow and not nearly as productive as I would have liked. Same with trainers. And horse earnings.

And how can I possibly decipher comparisons of speed, pace and form cycles looking at one horse at a time? What I need is to look at such factors in multiple ways as comparisons among horses, not to try to pull jaw teeth to get little nuggets.

And, how would I possibly decipher which factors in the PP's can be combined to indicate the likelihood of a horse performing well today? There is no efficient mechanism.

Since the PP's are devoted to single horses, there is nothing to show any tendancies of the field as a whole, which can be powerful information.

And, yes, you can notebook past performances and sift through to find patterns. But, my gosh is that slow!!!!!

Well, just wanted to give you a little to ponder. You know that whales are using computers to turn data every which way but loose. So, if you're still in the world of traditional PP's, good luck! I submit that the traditional past performance model is outdated and inefficient and conceals patterns (a needle in a haystack approach). Not that it is useless, just generally extremely inefficient.