Using information from the Trakus chart of the GI Kentucky Derby, horse owner, college professor and horseplayer, Marshall Gramm has found that fourth-place finisher Honor A.P. (Honor Code) may have actually run faster than any of his rivals.
According to Trakus, Honor A.P. traveled 6,712 feet or 49 feet further than race winner Authentic (Into Mischief). Tiz the Law (Constitution) also lost some ground and traveled 23 feet further then Authentic. For all three horses, their average speed was 37.8 miles per hour.
Gramm took an even deeper look into the numbers. He divided the distance each horse traveled by their final time, giving him a calculation of how many feet they traveled per second. Honor A.P. covered 55.40 feet per second. He then used that figure to come up with a final adjusted time for a mile-and-a-quarter, which is 6,600 feet. His recalculated time for Honor A.P. was 1:59.14.
His adjusted time for Authentic was 1:59.40. The actual time for the race was 2:00.61.
Gramm's calculations confirm that Honor A.P. may have had the worst trip of any of the main contenders in the Derby. This is the Equibase chart caller's summary of his trip: “Honor A.P. hesitated at the start, was unhurried while four wide into the first turn, looped into the backstretch six deep, made a steady sweeping move through the second turn, fanned into the nine path into the stretch, continued on and was making progress.
Honor A.P.was beaten five lengths.
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