A Dutch company with broad experience in timing motorsports and other types of racing has begun marketing a similar system to horse racing tracks that could provide a solution to ongoing and stubborn timing problems at U.S. tracks. The company, MYLAPS, which has offices throughout the world, recently completed a trial of its timing system at Sha Tin Racecourse in Hong Kong, according to multiple officials. Although precise details of the trial have not been disclosed, it entailed the installation of multiple wires beneath the dirt track at Sha Tin, which is run by the Hong Kong Jockey Club, a powerhouse on the international racing stage. The system was used to log sectional and final times for several trial races, according to officials with knowledge of the project. The MYLAPS horse racing timing system is based on the same technology that has long been used to log sectional times for high-speed motorsports such as F1 and NASCAR, as well as BMX, motocross, and human races. Strings of wires – called “loops” in industry parlance – are installed beneath the racing surface that transmit radio signals. The signals are registered by passive transponders carried by the vehicle or athletes when the devices pass directly over the wire. In contrast, timing at most major U.S. racetracks currently relies on a hybrid system of GPS receivers and beam timers. The GPS receivers, which are carried in saddlecloths and log positional data from satellites 10 times per second, are used to generate fractional times, while the beam timers are used to record the start and finish times of the races when a horse trips the beam. :: Subscribe to the DRF Post Time Email Newsletter: Get the news you need to play today's races!  Equibase, a partnership between racetracks and The Jockey Club that is the official data supplier for racing, began transitioning to a GPS system in 2018, and it’s now in place at 28 tracks. But the system has endured growing pains, and those growing pains have now entered an ungainly maturity. Despite consistent tweaks, handicappers and speed-figure makers continue to contend that the fractional times registered by the GPS system are too often inaccurate to as much as three-fifths of a second, a failing that most pin squarely on GPS. “The final times are accurate, but fractional times remain a big problem,” said Randy Moss, the television racing analyst who also is part of the team that makes Beyer Speed Figures. “And that’s because racing in 2018 tied itself to an inadequate technology. There is no indication that [GPS] will ever be an accurate timing system.” [Daily Racing Form is the exclusive provider of Beyer Speed Figures in its past performances. The figures are based on the accuracy of final times, which are calculated using beams that are tripped at the start of the race and the end of the race, so sectional timing issues do not have a significant impact on the calculation of the figures, Moss said.] Maurice Timmermans, the head of equine technology for MYLAPS, said in a recent interview that the “loops” timing system is accurate to 1/1000 of a second. While he declined to provide much detail on the Hong Kong trial, he said that the timing system now being marketed for racing requires the timing loops to be buried approximately one foot below the racing surface, whether on grass, dirt, or artificial surfaces. The transponders for the Hong Kong trial were placed in the horses’ saddlecloths, Timmermans said, though they have run other tests in which the transponders were placed on the horses’ bridles or attached to the boots of jockeys. Timmermans said that the loops can be buried deeper, but he said that the company has found that the one-foot depth is deep enough to avoid being disrupted by track maintenance equipment. The 3-millimeter wires are contained within a 25-millimeter conduit pipe, Timmermans said, and are easily replaced. Customizing for horse racing If the loop-timing system is nearly identical to that used in other sports for nearly two decades, why hasn’t it been used in horse racing before? Timmermans said that MYLAPS began looking three years ago at other sports where the company did not have a presence and landed on horse racing as a new market. The company promptly set about installing the wires for a trial and used a transponder that the company built for other sports. “It didn’t work,” Timmermans said. “So we had to tailor a solution.” The problem, Timmermans said, was the erratic and sometimes violent movement of the transponder itself “because of the way a horse travels,” which had a dramatic impact on the bits and pieces within the device. The company spent the next 18 months engineering a new transponder that could handle the movement, and then spent another year testing the product. “If you look at motocross in the U.S., or [snowmobiles], or BMX cycling, they have very similar travel patterns,” said Timmermans, who is Dutch. “The motocross bikes, they do wheelies, they do jumps, they go side to side, they get very dirty. So we could learn and implement a lot of those [lessons] into this product.” Coincidentally, that is the exact problem that Equibase is facing with its own GPS transponders, according to Kyle McDoniel, a former sports marketing official who was brought on to be the president and chief operating officer of Equibase in mid-2023. Equibase is currently exploring a number of hardware and software refinements to its own GPS transponders to iron out the problems, McDoniel said, while also testing other technology, such as optical tracking systems, to provide more accurate fractional readings and to improve the real-time display of the running order, which is notoriously prone to errors. “There are a lot of different overlapping systems that we need to put in place, so if we have an issue, we have a lot of redundancy that can correct the error,” McDoniel said. One of the technologies Equibase is testing is RTK GPS. The RTK stands for real-time kinematics, and it relies on the installation of a ground antenna to make more precise location readings. The optical-tracking system uses cameras to determine the locations of horses by using specific markers on the horse or jockey, such as the pattern of silks or the color of saddle towels, referenced to static markers on the track, such as the distance poles. McDoniel and Timmermans have discussed the MYLAPS system on several occasions, according to both, though the discussions have been at the exploratory stage. Several individual racing companies also have contacted MYLAPS, according to multiple officials, but none would return calls or acknowledge the talks for this article. McDoniel said that MYLAPS has a “great reputation” in the sports-data world, but he said the loop-timing system faces several hurdles if it were to be installed at U.S. racetracks, at least for timing individual races. First and foremost is the “vast number of permutations” at U.S. tracks for official starts and finishes. In the United States, the timer for races does not start until after a “run-up,” which is a distance from the starting gate to the first official pole (the official start is registered at most major tracks by a moveable beam). In addition, most racetracks use moveable rails on their turf courses to reduce wear and tear of the grass, leading to variances in ground covered, both for the total distance and the distance between poles. At Gulfstream Park, for example, there are “108 different start-finish permutations” among the track’s three racing surfaces, McDoniel said. “When you get into all the different permutations, it becomes hard to have a large number of wires buried under the racing surface,” McDoniel said. McDoniel also said he was unsure yet as to whether routine maintenance or short-term fixes to a track’s racing surface would pose a threat to the loop installations. But Timmermans said that MYLAPS is confident that tracks can use the loop system without concern. “In the conversations we have had with tracks so far, we look at the maintenance equipment they use, we look at the ground structure itself – the ‘cake-layer’ view – and then we position it at a depth that works for everyone,” he said. “We can go a little deeper, but you don’t want to go too deep if that’s not needed. We’re trying to strike the right balance.” More accurate workout times Using loop timing for workouts might be a better fit than racing for the United States, according to both Timmermans and McDoniel. For workouts, horses are supposed to be timed for a specific distance set by the trainer, usually ending at the finish line. The timing-loop system could provide precise times for the workouts, which are almost always hand-timed, and, at some training centers or farms, self-reported by the horse’s connections. Timmermans said that the timing-loop system would eliminate the errors of manual timing while also providing horsemen with real-time data from the workouts that can automatically be downloaded into training applications. MYLAPS doesn’t monetize the data collected by its hardware, Timmermans stressed, and the industry would be able to build those training applications from the data that the system collects. :: Get the Inside Track with the FREE DRF Morning Line Email Newsletter. Subscribe now.  McDoniel said that looking at installations of timing loops for workouts “is a natural starting point,” but he also said that a migration to loop timing creates a number of “logistical problems,” including the determination of the actual intended workout distance, which would require coordination with trainers. Still, the problems that would need to be solved to time workouts would be a much smaller set than those posed by race timing, McDoniel said. “Training would seem to be the obvious place to start with, because you’re working with a much more limited set of variables,” McDoniel said. Timmermans said that he continues to reach out to racing officials in the United States to discuss the potential of MYLAPS, in large part because he is convinced that GPS timing will never be accurate enough to provide precise fractional times. On a video call, he held up a GPS receiver. “We make these,” Timmermans said. “We sell these. And we’re not in this to chase GPS out. We’re only trying to get the timing right. And that needs a transponder. They are, and will always be, the most accurate.” McDoniel, who has developed a strong reputation in racing after less than a year in the business, says that Equibase is still committed to ironing out the problems in the GPS timing system, referencing the new technologies it is testing to get more precise readings. He also said that the manual clocking of fractional times is not a perfect system either, and that the main goal is to develop an automated system that solves a number of problems simultaneously. And while the loop-timing system developed by MYLAPS may be far more accurate in determining precise fractional times, it’s extremely limited compared to GPS. Loop timing delivers those precise times, but nothing else, whereas the continuous stream of data provided by the GPS transponders can be used in myriad ways, McDoniel said, including novel new handicapping products. “We want to get beyond sectional timing, to create an exact visualization of a race that is incredibly accurate,” McDoniel said. “I’m looking at everything that is out there to find out what is the best combination of products we need to bring to the industry. There are short-term things to solve, and long-term things to solve, and, to me, they envision a lot of components.” :: Want to learn more about handicapping and wagering? Check out DRF's Handicapping 101 and Wagering 101 pages.