As far as I know, Peter Clayton has never heard of VDW and knows nothing about race analysis. But what he does know about is Excel and how to build complex macros, and today he has completed one for me which should literally save me dozens of hours of tedious work a year.
In his Roushayd chapter in "Systematic Betting", VDW pointed up the significance of knowing a horse's racing history, and that is if anything brought out even more sharply in the slightly revised version of the Roushayd analysis Tony Peach included in his booklet "Racing in my System".
Over the past Winter I've been exploring this aspect in some detail and indeed am now convinced of its importance, but it is very time-consuming if one wants to appraise the field for a major handicap. The Post website has much of the data, but not all in the form most useful for a VDW analysis, and it lacks one of those comparison tools that the Which, John Lewis, Dabs and other websites have for enabling one to compare the key details for several "products" on one page. And even Which, John Lewis etc usually limit one to comparing four "products".
I keep my own database and until recently have been manually copying the VDW-friendly format data into separate Excel pages for each runner, and then further manually copying key data for each runner so that I can make comparisons. Extremely dull until one gets to the final stage and, for a race like the recent Lincoln, certainly more than an hour's work.
Peter Clayton built me quite a complex macro a couple of years ago, and I've recently been back to him to help with the issue of runners' histories. The result is what to me is a marvellous utility into which I have merely to cut and paste the runners from my race analysis workbook, add a couple of pieces of data, straight off the Post's form pdf, press a button and, hey presto, an Excel sheet for each runner with the full data from my database and the relevant details for the race being analysed, and a summary sheet with what I have found to be the four pieces of historical data per horse most vital for making comparisons. Literally after three minutes, at most, of cutting, pasting and data entry, I get what until today took an hour or more per large field handicap.
I've at least one VDW colleague whom I am sure could himself build the macro which achieves this result. But although I am quite at home with the likes of formulae and conditional formating in Excel, I've not progressed very far with VBA and the project Peter has completed is miles beyond my capability. So, a big thank you to Peter Clayton who, for what I regard as a very reasonable fee, has created the utility for me, and anyone who needs help with such a project could do a lot worse than Google Peter Clayton Excel.
