I'd love to hear bills thoughts more because I've taken a look at his work and it is very sophisticated and from what I can tell accurate and reliable
But I can jump in and shed a little light and say you'll never get skewed results from conditions or having a good field because your speed rating based on the relative performances compared to past speed ratings
It should be a little tougher on a course like this because you don't have past data points at the new course but I'm pretty sure that bill uses passed Runner performances to get some standard of what would be expected from a group of runners in the race
And if you have enough Runners and a big race like this would easily have them you can get a standard of comparable run times between other course's
Anyway with enough data points you should be able to get a very accurate picture within a small margin of error of how any Rays compares to a standardized or idealized race
So there's never a situation where conditions or quality of the field will impact it
The only thing would be the amount of reliable data points
So I do have a couple of additional questions for Bill, do you ever examined the races with some sort of margin of error of how reliable you think the quality of the data is?
So like would you ever give a speed rating and say what your margin of error is compare do another speed rating that have them much less margin of error
Anyway the only way is speed rating could really be way off would be if one Runner gave an all-out effort and the rest of the field Tanked. That is a intentionally ran at 3/4 effort. But such conspiracy type thinking would not happen in these types of conditions. As well as most conditions