COMMENTARY : Impact of The Racing Times: It Isn’t a Better Mousetrap

Notwithstanding the incessant human quest to build a better mousetrap, the basic design has endured. Mouse nibbles bait. Mouse dies. Job done.

But somehow, there is always an urgency to kill more mice more quickly; to build a mousetrap so good, that mice would become extinct. But men have walked on the moon, the atom has been split and the mousetrap endures the ages essentially unchanged. The world is fairly safe for mice, and the people at the Daily Racing Form are also breathing a bit easier this week.

For months, handicappers have awaited the arrival of Robert Maxwell’s The Racing Times, hanging patiently on the promise that the British publisher would launch, as advertised, an American rival to the Racing Form that would make the incumbent and sole source of past-performance information look like the Rosetta Stone. It would be the better mousetrap, one that gathered all the information fit to print into one package: better past-performance charts, real speed figures, better race charts and comprehensive statistics.

For months, handicappers have seen The Racing Times editors on virtually every racing telecast, promising a daily body of data complete and concise beyond their wildest imagining. The Racing Form monopoly, they promised repeatedly, was over. “Substance over form” was adopted as the slogan of a substantial number of respected racing minds who joined Maxwell for the siege of “America’s turf authority.” But, considering the early efforts, those at The Racing Times suffer from a condition common to all those who have challenged the Form: Premature exclamation.

The Form has not maintained its monopoly by accident.

The Racing Times has delivered on one promise. Its editorial content and design are, in the main, first rate. But the Form, in anticipation of a fight for survival, also has undergone massive improvement in its editorial presentation. Competition has improved the Form. Overestimating the competition has hastened the improvement. If its strength is obvious on Page 1, the shortcomings of The Racing Times -- and they are daunting -- are quickly evident upon the most cursory examination of its vital organs, the racing data.

The Racing Times appeared in public for the first time last weekend and the launch, perhaps from embarrassment, has been far more low key than the hype. While the Racing Form’s predated edition is available in neat, smug piles at newsstands by 7 a.m., the comparable edition of The Racing Times is a day behind.

Racing Times, the concept, was noble in its approach to providing everything the Form should but didn’t. Racing Times, the paper, is of questionable worth as a handicapping tool. Too late and, as it turns out, too little.

True, its past-performance charts are better structured than the Form’s. True, the speed figures provided by Washington Post racing columnist Andrew Beyer are vastly superior to the Form’s. But Racing Times’ early efforts have been riddled with inaccuracy, omission and error. The most glaring of those is the lack of workout data for New York and Florida tracks. The paper’s position is that it prefers to publish no information to that which is suspect or misleading. The paper may have solved this by hiring clockers, since it has no access to workout data, misleading or otherwise, at tracks where Racing Form clockers are the the only source. And such repeatedly restated concern over accuracy would be more palatable had an effort been made to debug The Racing Times’ data bank -- much of which was compiled during the ill-conceived, short-lived, never-taken-seriously FIGS Form project -- before it began selling the information.

Maxwell’s not-ready-for-prime-time racing paper is plagued by repeated instances of inconsistency and error. In some cases, running lines have been either missing or incomplete. Race conditions -- including, in one case, distance and surface -- have been misstated and speed figures omitted. At tracks in states in which medication is available, no race-day information has appeared. Points of call and margins are too often omitted from running lines. There is no data whatsoever on races run in Europe. Handicap with this? I don’t think so. If so much of the data is suspect, obviously inaccurate or incomplete, there can be no confidence in the main body of data and no excuse for presenting at $2.50 a copy of a product far from being ready for public consumption.

Better mouse trap? Not yet.