Two horses cross the line in exactly 75.40 seconds over six furlongs. One is at Pontefract on Good ground. The other is at York on the same Good ground. They haven’t run the same race. They haven’t even come close… and if you treat those two times as comparable, every speed rating you build on top of them will be wrong.
The fix is a standard time. It’s the boring layer underneath every speed rating, and I’d say most people who bet on speed have never built one. I think doing it once, on a Saturday morning, makes you read a finish time differently for good.
A standard time is a benchmark finish time for one course at one distance on Good ground. To build one, collect 20 winning times under those exact conditions, bring them to one class, and take the middle value. If you borrow times from another course, you also need a small adjustment for turns and slopes.
The short version
- A winning time only means something against the benchmark for that course, distance and going.
- The track matters more than the class. In my data Pontefract is about 6.6 seconds slower than Chepstow over six furlongs on the same Good ground.
- Going is the biggest adjustment. Class is much smaller than the old textbook tables suggest.
What does a standard time actually measure?
A horse race rewards finishing first, not running fastest. That sounds obvious, but it breaks the lazy version of speed analysis, which assumes a 75-second six furlongs is a 75-second six furlongs wherever it was run.
A standard time answers one question: given this course, this distance and this going, what do winners usually take to get from the start to the line? Once you have that, every finish time becomes a comparison instead of a raw number.
How do you create a standard time by hand?
This is a simplified version of the method Nick Mordin set out in Mordin On Time. It’s not the only way, but it’s the easiest way to do it once and see what you’re doing.
- Pick one course and one distance. Don’t try five distances at once. Choose the one you bet on most.
- Collect 20 winning times. Use Good ground. If there aren’t enough Good days, add Good To Firm. Keep it as close to Good as you can, because mixing in Soft ground at this stage pollutes the benchmark.
- Note the class of each race. Write the class number next to each time.
- Bring every time to one class. Pick a class to work in, say Class 4. Add about 0.02 seconds per furlong for each step a race sits above it, and take off the same for each step below. That’s a rough rule from the averages in the next section, and it’s a small adjustment.
- Take the median. Line the adjusted times up and pick the middle one. Not the average. A freak fast day or a race that crawled can drag an average around, and the median ignores them.
- Only if you borrowed times from another course, adjust for turns and slopes. When all 20 times come from the course itself, its shape is already inside the median, so skip this step. If you’re short of times and borrowing from a similar course, the usual rules of thumb are 0.30 seconds per furlong for a turn on a sprint, 0.20 on a longer trip and nothing at 10 furlongs or more, then about 1.50 seconds per furlong added for uphill and about 0.50 taken off for downhill. I haven’t tested those numbers against my own data, so treat them as rough.
That gives you one standard time for one course and distance on Good ground. Only about 70 more combinations to go if you want the whole UK.
How big are the adjustments? What 13 years of UK racing show
The traditional class tables are decades old. My database covers UK racing from July 2013 to March 2026, which is big enough to check them. Everything below is Flat Turf winners and describes what happened in those years, not what any course will do next season.
Class is a small adjustment. Across 18,651 winners on Good ground, Class 1 averages 12.43 seconds per furlong and Class 6 averages 12.53. That’s 0.10 seconds per furlong across the whole range, or 0.80 seconds per mile. The older tables put the gap at several seconds per mile. Spread over the five steps from Class 1 to Class 6, it works out at roughly 0.02 seconds per furlong per step, which is where the step 4 figure comes from.
Going is the biggest adjustment. This is 30,871 winners at six to nine furlongs, compared with Good ground:
| Going | Against Good ground | Races |
|---|---|---|
| Good To Firm | about 1.2 seconds per mile faster | 9,396 |
| Good | baseline | 9,775 |
| Good To Soft | about 1.3 seconds per mile slower | 3,945 |
| Soft | about 4.3 seconds per mile slower | 4,218 |
| Heavy | about 8.6 seconds per mile slower | 1,397 |
Heavy ground adds more time to a mile than the whole gap between Class 1 and Class 6 in this data. If your going adjustment is wrong, nothing else you do rescues the standard time.
A clean example is York over one mile. The mean winning time on Good ground is 97.42 seconds (50 races). On Soft it’s 102.16 seconds (20 races). That’s 4.7 seconds added by the ground alone, at the same course and distance.
Why does every course need its own standard time?
Take six-furlong Flat Turf winners on Good ground, at the 25 UK courses with at least 50 qualifying races:
| Course | Mean seconds per furlong | Races | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fastest | Chepstow | 11.73 | 74 |
| Redcar | 11.90 | 83 | |
| Hamilton | 11.91 | 149 | |
| Brighton | 11.93 | 84 | |
| York | 11.95 | 112 | |
| Slowest | Ascot | 12.40 | 51 |
| Chester | 12.43 | 82 | |
| Salisbury | 12.51 | 67 | |
| Fairyhouse | 12.55 | 78 | |
| Pontefract | 12.83 | 128 |
Pontefract is 1.10 seconds per furlong slower than Chepstow on the same Good ground. Over six furlongs that’s 6.6 seconds. A 73-second Pontefract winner and a 73-second Chepstow winner haven’t done the same thing. The track is doing most of the work in that comparison, not the horse.
Slopes, turns, the camber of the bends and the surface are the likely reasons. This data shows the gap, not which of them causes it.
One more point. Even with course, distance and going fixed, winning times still vary. The 207 Newmarket six-furlong winners on Good ground over 12 years run from 69.31 to 77.17 seconds. A typical winner sits about 1.3 seconds either side of the middle (that’s the standard deviation, 1.33). So a standard time is a historical reference point at the centre of that spread. It’s something to compare a performance against, not a time every winner has to hit.
What do I do with a standard time once I have one?
You stop asking whether it was a fast time and start asking whether it was a fast time for here, at this trip, on this ground. That’s the question a speed rating exists to answer.
Building 70 standards by hand is worth doing once. Keeping them up to date across every going condition is a bigger job. My Dynamic speed rating is a speed figure for each runner, and Class Par is the typical figure for the class of the race. When a horse’s rating sits above the Class Par, it has run faster than is normal for that level, and when it sits well below, it hasn’t. You can see both on the Speed and Pace tab of today’s racecards and make the comparison against your own standard times. See today’s racecards.
What this doesn’t cover
A standard time describes a course on Good ground. It doesn’t give you the going allowance for a particular day, or tell you how fast a horse would have run if the race had been run differently. Both of those change what a finish time means.
