"Should You Use Finishing Speed Percentage in Your Form?"

Kingsley on SEN radio with racing.com. Segment courtesy of SEN x racing.com.

A punter named Jay wrote in to say he backs a lot of UK racing and has started using finishing speed percentage, or FSP, in his form. He wanted to know if I look at it. The honest answer is that I am not really familiar with it. But the question behind his question is one I can help with, because it applies to any new figure that turns up in your form guide. Before you ask whether a metric is useful, you need to ask how accurate the data is and whether anyone has tested it over a long enough period to know.

What finishing speed percentage appears to be

From what I understand, the UK is only just starting to introduce sectionals into its data. Finishing speed percentage would sit inside that. It seems to be something to do with the closing section measured against the average speed of the run. So it would tell you how much ground a horse made up on the field, and it would give you some read on the efficiency of the race and the way the pace was run. That is a useful thing to know in principle. Sectional work has value. But knowing what a figure is meant to measure and knowing it measures it well are two different things.

New data is hard to trust straight away

This is the part I would focus on. When a data set is brand new, you have no backlog of testing behind it. You cannot look back over years of races and see whether horses with a strong figure went on to perform better than the market expected. Without that, you are taking the number on faith. It might be accurate. It might be recorded inconsistently across tracks. It might be measuring something real that the market has already factored into the price. You do not know yet, and neither does anyone else, because the history is not there.

So the first thing I would do is look at how the data is being collected and how accurate it is coming in. Then I would ask whether there is any historical sectional data available to test it against. If there is, you have something to work with. If there is not, you are using a tool that has not been proven, and you should size your confidence accordingly.

Different tools, different philosophies

There are always new tools and new philosophies coming through in this game. That is not a bad thing. Some of them end up being genuinely useful. But the ones that help you are the ones you have tested yourself, or that have enough of a track record for you to trust the testing someone else has done. A figure that feels helpful is not the same as a figure that adds value. Value comes from knowing something the market has not priced properly, and you can only establish that by looking back.

If you like the idea of finishing speed percentage, keep using it, but treat it as an observation rather than a decision maker for now. Track it. See whether the horses it flags actually perform better than their price suggested. Give it time and a decent sample. If it holds up, you have added something real to your form. If it does not, you have lost nothing but the effort of checking.

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More from Kingsley

• Why Every Punter Eventually Has to Reinvent Themselves
• Why Is Every Bet Just an Edge and Not a Moral?
• "Should You Feed the Market Back Into Your Own Ratings?"

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