Integrated Racetrack Tester a One-Stop-Shop in Track Surface Measurements

In the week leading up to this year's Breeders' Cup, observers who remained trackside at the conclusion of morning training would have spotted a young man with a short bristly moustache lug an unusual looking contraption around the two ovals at the heart of Del Mar.

If these trackside observers hung around long enough, they would have spotted this two-legged interloper stop to place down and trigger what appeared to be a miniature guillotine, twiddle with a few buttons, then either jump back into his golf cart or set off on foot for another sixteenth-of-a-mile sprint.

On the Tuesday morning before the championships, the young man in question, Kaleb Dempsey, stopped mid-rounds to express satisfaction with his revolutionary-looking sidepiece.

“It's been very consistent,” said Dempsey, laboratory manager of the Racing Surfaces Testing Laboratory (RSTL), in a way that betrayed both relief and trepidation (more on this in a bit). “Overall, I've been very happy with it.”

The darling of Dempsey's eye is the Integrated Racetrack Tester. It's not, in fact, a guillotine. But it does execute a vitally important function that seeks to drag the sometimes technologically backward-looking world of managing racetrack surfaces into something resembling modernity.

At every sixteenth pole, Dempsey will stop and plonk the upright contraption onto the track surface. He will then let a one-kilogram mass fall a meter onto a small block that in turn will strike a one-centimeter probe-tip into the ground. Dempsey does this at five, 10 and 15 feet from the rail at every stop.

The probe tip will measure the total depth penetrated. At the same time, the machine is equipped to simultaneously collect a range of other information, including moisture content, surface temperature, moisture salinity, GPS coordinates, and a timestamp of when the information was collected. This data is stored locally.

“And then at the end of the data collection–I have a cellular modem embedded into this which is something we didn't have last time–we actually generate an automatic surface report in PDF form,” said Dempsey, who added that the tool will also send track superintendents a raw-data set for good measure.

With all this information at their fingertips, superintendents can accurately gauge the consistency of the track surface–in other words cushion depth and moisture content and other useful data points–all around the track. All these measurements from this one single tool–a hitherto unheard of concept.

Indeed, up until now most track managers have used the GoingStick on the turf, and a FieldScout TDR Meter to measure moisture content in both the turf and the dirt. And unlike the GoingStick, the Integrated Racetrack Tester doesn't depend upon who's using it.

“I could let you pick it up and use it, and it would get the same measurement that I would have,” he said, adding that it provides a more qualitative measurement of the turf as compared to its more vintage counterpart.

“In the U.S., we tend not to have a qualitative measurement of the turf. 'Oh yes, it's firm.' Or, 'oh yes, it's yielding.' In Australia and New Zealand, they don't do it qualitatively. They take a look at the average reading–that's how they read the turf. They have a scale of one to 11,” said Dempsey.

Furthermore, the Integrated Racetrack Tester doesn't discriminate–it can be used on the turf, the dirt and synthetic surfaces.

This means it has the potential to satisfy the daily surface monitoring and measurement requirements written into the Horse Racing Integrity and Safety Act (HISA)–requirements not currently being met uniformly across all U.S. racetracks.

“We have a high number of tracks that are finally starting to provide their daily measurements thorough the maintenance quality system. That's a good thing–it's how we really pull this data together,” said Dempsey. “But the hardest step is to actually get people to take the daily measurements so we can have those links.”

Among the readouts issued to the track crews is a graph showing a middle green zone sandwiched between yellow and then red cushions. The trick is to maintain a wavey line that more or less stays within the green zone, to reflect a consistent surface.

“You want to see that every day,” said Dempsey, who then pulled up on his phone a graph showing a 12-day dataset for Aqueduct. “You can see, when they opened it up, they had to tune it up a little bit. But now it's a lot more consistent.”

The toughest period for a track manager, he said, is the initial stages of a meet.

“When you're coming out from being closed to open, it's always a little tricky–it takes a lot of work. It's not perfect the whole time. It takes time to even out.”

What this tool does is confirm or refute the subjective impressions and suspicions that track crews make as they go about the process of ironing out these kinks in the track, tightening or loosening it up bit by bit in preparation for the advent of the first set of hooves.

“You don't make big adjustments on a track,” Dempsey said. “You want to tweak it a little bit over time.”

Tweaking over time is a succinct summary of how Dempsey has approached the designing, building and modification of the Integrated Racetrack Tester, developed using Jockey Club funding.

Indeed, it was four years ago that Dempsey unveiled an earlier version of this tool–a big, lumbering cumbersome unit that, contrary to its size, proved as delicate as a Faberge Egg.

It's taken a few years for Dempsey to reach the prime-time stage of the tool's launch. Pandemic-era restrictions held back his work somewhat, while earlier iterations of the machine proved ill-suited to life on the racetrack.

“This is a pretty harsh environment. It's dusty, wet, the vibrations from the truck. The track crews–we've got some pretty heavy-handed people,” said Dempsey. “You test things at the lab and you think, 'Oh, that'll work great.' But nothing beats field testing.”

An Achilles Heel of the current iteration, for example, was the guillotine contraption that catapults the probe into the soil.

There are now seven of these machines currently in use. The New York Racing Association has one. So does Churchill Downs, Oaklawn Park, Colonial Downs, as well as tracks in New Zealand. It's expected to have several important corollary uses, including in better understanding the patterns underlying equine fatalities and injuries.

Using two years of race-day data out of New Zealand which used the Longchamp penetrometer (on which the Integrated Racetrack Tester is based), researchers determined that horses had lower odds of injury on a slow track compared to other conditions–perhaps not exactly a landmark discovery by itself.

But interestingly, the researchers pointed to the overall infrequency of fast race-day conditions, and observed, “it may be that the reduction in the number of races presented as fast tracks is a direct response by the industry to the perceived risk of racing on such surfaces.”

Another corollary use, said Dempsey, could be for the tracks to share this detail-rich set of data with the punters.

“I think there's real value in that. It all goes to transparency,” said Dempsey. “But at the same time, it's not uncommon for data to be misinterpreted. There's always a risk in sharing information like this.”

The tool currently costs about $10,000.

“I'm hoping by next summer to have a 20% reduction in price,” he said, adding how the GoingStick is of comparable price.

Demspey assembles these units himself, in what sounds like the building of a large Meccano set. In a satisfying rebuke to the pathology of hoarding behind closed doors intellectual property beneficial to the public good, the designs to this machine are open source, accessible through the RSTL's website.

“If you wanted to–if you had the skills to–you could make it yourself,”  he said. “Our mission is just to make tracks safer.”