Changes to Default Vacant Boxes Next Week
At the GRNZ Board meeting on Wednesday 31 July 2024, the Board resolved to amend Racing and Grading Guideline 19.3 which governs which boxes will be left vacant by default, when drawing a field of less than eight entrants.
The changes are to fields of seven, six and five. For Rail-Lure tracks, fields of seven will have Vacant Box 1, six will have Vacant Boxes 1 and 2, and fields of five will have Vacant Boxes 1, 2 and 8. The Straight Track will be the same, except fields of six will have Vacant Boxes 1 and 8.
Planning for the new "TAB Dog" was taken into consideration, so the TAB Dog is present in all configurations.
These changes were signalled during the last two GRNZ Roadshows and stem from a presentation on a trial of six dog fields in Australia, after which the presenter made the anecdotal comment - "I would like to have seen the six dogs boxed together with no vacant boxes between them".
GRNZ then evaluated result and injury data for fields of less than eight and made an unexpected discovery.
Over the past three years, we have run 3133 races with seven dog fields. Of these, 274 were run with Vacant Box 1 (eight dog field with #1 scratched) and remarkably, the rate of injuries in these races was significantly lower than any other configuration.
This data was provided to the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), who verified that it was statistically significant and encouraged GRNZ to further exploit this finding.
Today
Both meetings closing today, Cambridge and Invercargill, will be the first drawn under the new guidelines, should they have any fields with less than eight entrants.
NB: The concept of "Vacant Box 8" may seem very odd - Why not simply stop the field at number seven, as Thoroughbreds and Harness do? However, there are betting systems that have hard-coded a field of eight for greyhound races, so we are obliged to provide them a total of at least eight entrants-and-vacant-boxes in every race.
