I agree it is well done and quite comprehensive.

Its purpose is to cater for people on the run or in the pub with a beer in the other hand - supplying them with lots of info and news. Fair enough because that is where and how a great many fans operate these days.

It has one large drawback - by comparison with a standard formguide page it provides no perspective of the race. Betting is all about assessing how 6 or 8 dogs will compete with one another. You can't do that (visually or otherwise) on a hand-held small screen and the app does not offer that picture anyway. You can with a normal Fastrack formguide page. (But not with non-Vic racing because Ozchase soaks up two to three pages per race).

Hopefully a good small screen will encourage more fans to take a deeper interest in the sport via a big screen/page. An educational program might help. Words to that effect should be included on the app.

The form also needs to include PIR not just speed map which can be subjective. I would also like to see a symbol for dropping back in class , for eg when a dog drops back to 250+ rank . If those features are embedded it would save me a lot of time

Rob,
Dropping back in class can be a help to a dog - or it might not. For 20 years I have been searching for a measure which properly reflects that benefit or not. No success. Doing it by eye is as good as anything.

One of the biggest problems in assessing class is that Vic is the biggest offender in that it has a myriad of grades and classifications (you mentioned just one) or, in some cases, none. What is the point of a Non Penalty race? Further confusion is caused by the ability of a good dog to keep doing the rounds of the state picking up low grade wins due to the kindly grading system.

How about KISS? It's much cheaper. Simpler IT and fewer staff or consultants.

Let me add a comment in respect to Vic speed maps. As near as I can determine, the source is a calculation of the km/hr that a dog recorded previously over the sectional distance at a given track.

Whether that means the dog's best sectional performance or the average of a few is unknown. I have always used an average of the dog's last 10 starts. Sometimes that agrees with the Watchdog, sometimes not, so I have my suspicions.

Either way, neither method is subjective but it does depend on how good your source material was.

PS GRV is also risky in that it publishes sectionals for Handicap races without really highlighting the fact that they cover different distances. The same problem applies to the right hand column where a dog's Best is actually over a Handicap (ie shorter) distance but is not so flagged.