Tweets started not long after the race, and the chatter continued for several hours.

In the original article we hinted we might be surprised to see too many racetracks on the list (and quite honestly Foursquare was so new then we were not even sure it would fly). However, it seems some of the younger foursquare set are visiting racetracks, and they are telling their friends.

I did a quick scan today on Bing, trying out their new social search tool. I typed in Monmouth Park and found a link to Foursquare, which shows its visits, who has been there, a map to the track, and tips about the venue.

That is 215 visits from Foursquare folks, which is not too bad at all.  147 uniques and 215 visits shows a fairly good repeat visit rate, as well. Congrats are in order to John F, who seems to be a horseplayer. He’s the “Mayor” of Monmouth.

I decided to check a few other tracks. Since Belmont is more accessible to a larger population, I assumed we might see more action than its Jersey cousin. However…..

Only 142 visits. But the Mayor of Belmont? It is some guy named Joe M. I don’t know about you, but I think this guy oozes racetrack.

There are some promotional opportunities for businesses who embrace this medium. I wonder what might work for racing, or if anyone has begun to brainstorm about it.

If you would like to check more racetracks to see if the younger demo is visiting your favorite, you can at Foursquare.com.

Hosts at Woodbine Live

We do not see television ratings for racing increase much anymore, although this year we saw some nice bumps for the Derby, which was welcomed. In general any rise will be small and seemingly not sustainable. North of the border, this is not the case, but it is also not your average, every day horse racing telecast.

Race Night on the Score was a long running weekly two hour racing show, pumped into Canadian homes via a cable sports network. The program was paid for by Woodbine Entertainment, as they tried to get people to watch both standardbred and thoroughbred racing, and become customers. The format was simple : show races, handicap them, show human interest stories about trainers and owners, and so on. In effect, it was the “formula” that we have seen for many years.

It is not impolite to say that it was a failure. The ratings were microscopic.

This season they made a change. They rebranded the show and called it “Bet Night Live”. Yes, a show on racing using that nasty word that we seem to want to hide every moment of every day – betting. In the new format they go after the tight market of people who want to play a game, or learn a game, while offering them a chance to win prizes, and win money. They do this in conjunction with their ADW – Horseplayerinteractive.com – and meld that into the show itself. They also have kept their handicapping expert in the mix, so serious players still get a chance to hear some handicapping, and newer ones will learn. Gone are the human interest stories that we have all seen since the medium was invented.

Laura and Sandy Hawley

The show adds the in-studio sports updates, and has a contestant picking races in studio as well. They have also nicely weaved education, for bettors and fans, old and new (tonight they have a feature on what to look for in a post parade, for example). They are selling a game and are selling a chance to make some money. They have even batted around an idea on a “pick all” where one fan has the chance to pick all the winners and walk away with $1M in cash. In a nutshell, the show is fresh, fast and nothing like we’ve seen before in our sport.

What is the result?

The ratings are up 300%.

In addition, according to Greg Blanchard at Woodbine, sign-ups to their ADW are in “the triple digit range each show”.

In Studio

We wrote about going after a targeted small slice of the game playing market like this in our piece “Positioning Racing”: “For those who would say concentrating on one type of customer pigeonholes us, I would say that is unimportant and in fact the antithesis of what successful companies are doing in this century. ” Customers of countless products or services are simply a slice of a bigger market. We cannot be all things to all people. Trying to grab a slice of a market is better than no market at all and catering to every whim and wish of what customers we would like to have is 1960 thinking – and completely wrong. It has no place in present day marketing. The team at Woodbine seems to be embracing this new philosophy, and it seems to be working. They are no longer sitting in a production meeting trying to be all things to all people or worrying about what faction of the industry they will or will not offend, they are focused on getting one slice of this market, and using the medium to achieve that goal.

Not surprisingly, the existing market – the one who likes human interest stories, stories on the horses, or on the sport itself – are upset. On a thread at an industry website where the show was being discussed, some of these insider comments, after the initial show, were:

“Not enough interviews with horsemen and their thoughts”

“I agree with Brian…it was silly, childish and amateurish.”

“I too watched this show, I was very disappointed with the new format. I had to turn it off after 30 minutes of watching.”

“Please bring back the old format. The only people who want to watch the show are real Racing fans. The new show is painful to watch and will lose more viewers than it will gain.”

Woodbine Track Handicapper Jim Bannon

Seth Godin, a marketing writer who concentrates on new marketing and the changing world wrote this about the existing market in his book Free Prize Inside:

“Satisfied customers are not likely to increase your sales. Satisfied customers are not likely to push you and your colleagues to stay ahead of the competition. One day, in fact, the competition will pass you and the satisfied customers will quietly leave.

The problem is that management really likes those satisfied customers. The first question they’ll ask about any innovation is “Will our satisfied customers like it?” Of course, this is a silly question, because satisfied customers already like what you’ve got. The question you ought to ask first is, “Will people dissatisfied with what they are doing now embrace this, and, even better, will they tell the large number of unsatisfied people to go get it right away?”

We hope this provides a lesson for us in racing. We need to concentrate on selling the game to people who are not watching, instead of those who are. The people that are already fans are already watching, on computers, racing channels, or at the track. They do not have to be sold to with mass media, the people who are not watching and are pre-qualified to play a game are. In reality, we must do a complete 180 on what we have been doing.  If we do, perhaps we have a chance to grow.

The new items are as follows:

The have added three new chart calls – start,  the 1/8th pole and the 7/8′ths pole. This is good for punters who want to see if a horse was in the two or three path for most or part of a turn, or was tucked beforehand. You can also see as a bettor, just how much speed was flashed in the last 1/8th with the new 7/8′ths call point.

Ground covered, in feet. Trakus charts this, and it has been added to the chart. You can see that above in the “dist” column.

Bettors are always looking for an edge. For those who download these charts for their own software, for example, it should add some excellent model-able new data points.

This year, despite the often used excuse of “the economy” for racings ills, the Derby, in terms of both wagering volume and attendance were up. This flew right into the  face of conventional wisdom that the weather would kill attendance, and the lack of a big horse to draw wagering would hurt the handle numbers.

What happened? It is tough to gauge perfectly without seeing some back end metrics, and most certainly the last few years have been down, so year over year comparisons might be difficult, but I will take a shot. I think Churchill has learned to brand-market their big event better, and over time this has paid off.

There was hand-wringing on several initiatives from true blue race fans. I think these items are helping:

The Kentucky Oaks on Bravo. Some are upset that we are on that channel, because they do not cover racing like we want them to cover racing. The fly in that ointment is that we are not the market; we are going to watch it on Twinspires, or HRTV. This helps brand to a new audience.

The Derby Red Carpet chatter is another item that makes some players’ blood boil. I do not particularly care if a female movie star is wearing a yellow hat she paid $8000 for, or if figure skater Johnny Weir likes Ice Box, and neither do most of you. But some casual fans do, and this brands the event to them.

The Kentucky Derby Party website. We researched this item and spoke about it in February here at R2. My Derby party was two horseplayers, with three computers and two televisions, trying to make positive expectation bets. For others, who want to drink a mint julep and box four horses for some fun, this seems to be working just fine.

In addition to the above there has been a strong push on using social networks for this race and in fact, in all of racing. Being a web marketer I realize that this can be a hard sell to old business, and because we can not (but we are getting better)  measure what kind of revenue this adds to the bottom line with 100% accuracy, there are still many who find this spending does not provide actionable return on ad spend, and say a radio ad is still better.

Here are the news mentions via the web on for the Derby since 2004, via Google Trends (note, it will take some time for full searches and news mentions to show):

The reach for the Kentucky Derby website was at an all time high:

In addition via micro-blogging platforms like Twitter, the time per mention was one minute and the sentiment, good to bad was 6:1. Blogs had similar positive statistics, and news items were graded at 22:1 positive. These mediums are not going away. As a colleague said the other day, “If your company is not doing this, you are being professionally negligent.”

There are numerous problems in racing and most everyone seems to want them fixed overnight. But with brand marketing, according to marketer Mark Hughes, it takes 6 years and $60M to brand an event. If he is right, the Kentucky Derby is doing just fine and by doing simple web marketing and some cross promotion, it is not costing anywhere near $60M.

Decimal odds are in one way the “betfairization” of racing, because the UK betting giant reports its odds in decimal form to its customers. For people who play racing, seeing 3.65 instead of 5-2 might be a akin to New Coke, but for younger bettors who are cutting their teeth on the exchanges, the opposite is true.

There are several ways to report decimal odds, and all of them are more accurate than tote odds.

One way, pure decimal, is to list the odds, to the 5 cent number plus one. For example Lil Feller in today’s first at Turf Paradise is listed at 3.15. This means he is 2.15-1, or if you bet $100 you get $315 back.

Another way is American decimal, which US bettors would understand a little better. Little Feller is listed as +215, meaing the same thing. If you bet $100 you win $215; you get $315 back.

In contrast, on the tote board at Turf Paradise, the horse would simply be shown as “2-1″, a less accurate figure.

One of the obvious benefits of reporting odds in decimal form is the benefit of final payouts. When we see a horse at 5-2, he could be paying $7 or $7.90. For a horse who moves from 5-2 to 2-1 last flash, and wins, he will probably be dealt some horseplayer wrath asking questions of funny business. In fact, there was probably not much wrong with that move when you consider he could have moved from only an $7.00 payout to a $6.90 one. Seeing that horse on an exchange moving from 3.50 to 3.45 is nothing but 5 pennies.

More than likely we can guess what happens in this instance – existing fans will want their old odds back. In a business where players play for 30 years or more we are not much for change. However, I hope they try this for more than one occasion and ask serious questions to new racing fans regarding their take on them, as well as looking at the overall potential growth picture.

Marketing writer Seth Godin wrote about this in one of his books “Free Prize Inside”, and I wholeheartedly agree:

Satisfied customers are not likely to increase your sales. Satisfied customers are not likely to push you and your colleagues to stay ahead of the competition. One day, in fact, the competition will pass you and the satisfied customers will quietly leave.

The problem is that management really likes those satisfied customers. The first question they’ll ask about any innovation is “Will our satisfied customers like it?” Of course, this is a silly question, because satisfied customers already like what you’ve got. The question you ought to ask first is, “Will people dissatisfied with what they are doing now embrace this, and, even better, will they tell the large number of unsatisfied people to go get it right away?”

It will be interesting to see what happens.

But there are a few conditions.

Andrew Twaits, who is Australia’s Betfair head, looks at the new rules on his widely read blog.

Some of the conditions Racing NSW has decided to include in their “internet access” approval process rival anything the Chinese government could come up with as part of its internet censorship policy. They include requirement for punters to:

• allow Racing NSW to install special monitoring software on the laptop;

• only use the approved laptop when on a NSW thoroughbred race course;

• only use the laptop to access approved wagering websites (i.e. no racing information sites and no emails); and

• pay Racing NSW an unspecified annual monitoring fee.

In other news, the track announced that they will be providing, for on course phone calls, two dixie cups and a piece of string.

Twaits concludes with what probably will happen: “As long as these new local rules of racing remain in place, Racing NSW will be giving its core funding base – the punters – yet another reason to stay away from NSW race courses.”

Quick Notes:

I did get another chuckle, this time from our friends at PETA. Watch out for them if  they land Sex.com.  You heard it at R2 first!

We spoke of Foursquare in an article below. They are growing like a bad weed, signing almost 100,000 customers in 10 days.

Nice infographic from Mashable about Twitter. Is anyone shocked that “pointless babble” is such a big slice of the pie?

So, how many people tried to visit ntra.com on March 13? Google Trends hints that the number may have been unprecedented for the site. Queries for “NTRA” reached #8 on Saturday’s overall hot search terms list, spiking near the webcast’s start time — a pattern termed “Volcanic” by the search engine:

Click to view larger image

One thing was proved by the debacle (for which NTRA president Alex Waldrop apologized last night): There’s interest in watching racing’s stars online.

Since we deal with many of these statistics each day here at r2, our second video is the history of all things net. I found it really well done, and some of the stats are eye-opening. It is hard to believe that with all this going on, ADW betting over the internet for racing is still below 20% of total wagering. Is the glass half full, or half empty?

For about a year now, more and more companies are scanning message boards, twitter, Facebook, blogs and other social media avenues using software, or consulting firms. One easy way for us to do similar, with whatever we’d like (free! But not quite as accurate mind you), is to use socialmention.com. It is a simple search based tool which scans the web for such mentions. It also adds some interesting statistics on sentiment, passion and reach for brands or keywords.

So, let’s check it out for the two protagonists in the Apple Blossom, Zenyatta and Rachel Alexandra.

The sentiment index is fairly good. For every one bad mention, there are three good ones for a 3:1 ratio. If your followers are passionate (represented by the passion number above) that means they are likely to tweet or post often positively about the item in question. Zenyatta’s followers are pretty passionate! If you look at some subsets, these stats seem to hold well for blogs, news and mentions.

How about Rachel?

Once again these Rachel fans kick some butt. With only 26 “bad” mentions to 212 good, the 8-1 ratio dwarfs Zenyatta. The passion index is less than her rivals’, but if all those Zenyatta fans had to counter all the Rachel ones, I would think it would explain that pretty well.

Personally, we’ll start with football and build up to a multi-sport widget. We’ll also develop casino games. Our ambition is to have an appropriate subset of the full sweep of a gambling portfolio available on television. It’s not practical to have 250 different slot selections on a television, it’ll be a subset of that. Televisions have the advantage of being 42 inches, or 50 inches or so; whatever size screen it is, it’s usually the biggest and best quality screen in the house. The exciting thing is, if this platform is as successful as we think it might be, we can then bring real drama to the way that we present casino games. Putting the level of animation and video quality already seen online into a television widget will make it that much more of an invigorating experience.

More here.

To watch the TV in action, check the Reuters news story on Youtube here.

Where do visitors of the Paulick Report go to most after visiting his site? Answer below.

Ustream has been pretty popular, and growing. Today they had close to 700,000 viewers for the Tiger Woods press conference.  There should be more horse racing on this site, in my opinion, but either our customer base does not fit the user demographic, or there simply are not enough horse fans out there playing the races. I would guess it’s a little of both. There is some Latin-American racing on there, which I find a little odd. Who did I find that out from? Who else, Sid Fernando. If an obscure race, with obscure horses, with obscure pedigrees are racing, chances are Sid knows about it.

Speaking of Latin-America, the CEO of Sportingbet says watch out for this area of the world to be the next betting market. Is racing prepared for that?

Where do visitors of Equidaily.com go after visiting that site? Answer below.

Anyone watching the Olympics online? I have been at Vancouver2010.com. For virtually any event, you can get split times, scoring and more all in real time. It is a fabulous experience, and I often keep it going while I am watching anything with judging on the television. It amazes me how we can get such awesome data-power for the olympics, but we can not seem to get anything close for racing, with data and data innovation being vital to the sports existence.

Equibase did add weather and track condition via an RSS with mobile capability to their scratches page this week. That’s a good thing. I hear through the grapevine they are getting many hits a day for this service.

Answer: According to Hitwise, the leading website for downstream visits from the Paulick Report is……… bloodhorse.com. Interesting, considering. As for our friend Seth, they read his site, then its off to drf.com.

One may think it is a malaise about something gambling related, rather than just the pure sport of racing. So I tried poker, just to see what would happen, in a cross category test:

Then I tried a bet seller, instead of a betting game.

And last, a sports related fan game:

There is growth out there, but racing is clearly having a tough time grabbing a slice of it.

2,885 people responded to the question of their age:

Under 25: 9 (0.3%)
Age 26-39: 259 (9.0%)
Age 40-55: 1,182 (41.0%)
Over 55: 1,435 (49.7%)

These are no surprise and we all know them to be true.

We looked before at some other websites which cater to gambling.

Betfair.com (some data estimated):

We hear a great deal about “getting young people to the track” and often that is accompanied with a message of bands, giveaways and cheap beer. In addition we hear suggestions about having less time between races because of short attention spans, or making racing easier to understand with dumb-downed past performances. That might be a good strategy for a slice of the market, but for people who are interested in following racing from a gambling perspective, it appears the medium is much more important than the message.

“We’re exploring what we as a business can do to monetize our product through traditional business, instead of through gambling channels,” said [Sasha Sanan]. “We’re looking at a multitude of new technology platforms ranging from Facebook and different social media games like FarmVille, to current mobile applications, to traditional video gaming, and even fantasy sports and general interest in sports and entertainment consumption.”

Is this the same initiative as was mentioned in the Racing Post over the weekend? The ambitions of its principals, which include Satish Sanan, seem greater:

Their primary objectives include generating a revenue stream that can support the marketing of racing and bolster integrity in areas such as medication use and wagering.

The group is also considering initiatives such as the formation of an industry-held account wagering business and the creation of a national structure for American racing …

Potentially interesting — or divisive — industry developments may be ahead.

In Buzzmarketing, writer Mark Hughes says that people are 28 times more likely to tell others about a bad experience than a good one. Pre-net this might result in some bad karma, and maybe a small slice of lost sales. After all, word of mouth could spread, but it took time, effort and had to have that certain edge to tap into psyche of the public.

With the Internet this has all changed – things can spread in minutes not weeks.

On Saturday as everyone knows, the jocks at Penn National voted to not ride horses owned by Michael Gill. Immediately the buzz from the backstretch started. Text messages, chat board posts, tweets and more. The virus was unleashed. Quickly jumping on this was Ray Paulick of the Paulick Report.

His original story spawned 187 comments.

His next story had 135.

His next (this morning) has 50 or so and counting.

If you believe statistics that say only 5% of so comment on stories via the medium, that is a ton of interest in this story.

In addition, this story was quickly picked up by the regular media, has resulted in possibly 200 or 300 pages on chat boards, probably hundreds more comments via email. All in about 72 hours.

Ten or twenty years ago there were similar stories like this, but they had a tough time spreading quickly. Maybe an industry trade magazine would have it as a story in your mailbox a month later. You could not comment on the story, unless you write a letter to the editor to run a month ahead of that. Maybe there would be some sort of meeting if people we energized enough.  The buzz would be muted, and it would probably all go away. Racing itself responded fairly slowly to any controversy back then, because that is the way they are built. They did not have to respond quickly.

Racing in 2010 is just like it was before – much of it is still behind closed doors. We have heard nary a peep from anyone inside racing about this, while customers and fellow horse owners are typing away. It makes for trouble, because when customers, participants, industry watchers, bloggers, websites and so on are living in a transparent world, and participating in the conversation, while racing is not, there is a disconnect. And those disconnects are not good for any business.

As most know he is more than likely being dumped from the Tonight Show sometime in the coming weeks.  In reading the demographic ratings for his show, I see that his median viewer age is 45 and he wins the 18-34 demo, while David  Letterman’s median viewer age is 57. I do not think it is by accident. O’Brien speaks to the younger set quite well.

Case in point? This week O’Brien’s team has been placing this ad on Craigslist (beware it is being taken off at times, and is off and on):

It says:

4 SALE: BARELY-USED LATE NIGHT TALK SHOW – MAKE ME AN OFFER!!! (UNIVERSAL STUDIOS)

Information for potential buyers:

- Measures 100′ x 100′ x 32′ — plenty of room for a futon!

- Designed for 11:35 but can be easily moved

- Band can be sold separately

- Buyer must honor Barry Manilow booking next Thursday

MAKE ME YOUR BEST OFFER! (Also willing to trade for Coldplay tickets.)

Posting on the skewed young Craigslist, making fun of himself and the multi-million dollar corporate jungle of late night tv at the same time. “Willing to trade for Coldplay tickets.” Brilliant marketing, in my opinion, and it will be a huge reason why his viewers will follow him where ever he goes next.

It is well known that the demo’s for racing are skewed towards the over 55 set. I think we speak to them fairly well. But we don’t do a very good job speaking to people under the age of 50.

Maybe we should hire Team O’Brien as marketing guru’s. They clearly know what they are doing.

Hat tip to Gawker.com.

As most know there is a dispute that has halted the very popular YouTube race replay channel “Partymanners.” This has spawned serious discussion about how some racing entities have distributed (and in some cases blocked) replays via the web. Some tracks use their own websites, some use racereplays.com, others have their own ideas. We are happy to shed an opinion on this via a guest post from Raleigh. He is a 30-something racing enthusiast and tech industry professional in Northern California.

Recently a YouTube user that had been acting on his own accord as a kind of digital historian for racing ran into an unfortunate circumstance whereby all of his 1500-odd videos of races from the last 30 years were taken down over a copyright dispute.  It was not as the result of any industry action, I’m happy to report, but the loss of these videos to the general public and the outcry that followed from fans does bring up I think a useful and actionable lesson for the industry.

Websites vs. Platforms

Web 1.0 was very much a web site oriented model, where data was locked up in proprietary formats on proprietary sites.  The key development of Web 2.0 was the introduction of flexible, easy to use APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) that allowed data to flow freely across the internet.  Sites were no longer mere sites, a place to visit to read something, they became web platforms, and web services that interacted with the larger web.  We can see this most strongly with the dramatic growth and increasing ubiquity of services such as YouTube, Paypal, Google Maps, Facebook, and Twitter.

I want to talk specifically about YouTube as a service, what sorts of things it enables, and why it is a better platform for serving up race replays than the sorts of proprietary, lock-down, site based approaches most of racing currently uses.

The approach to race replays that most of the industry uses is to use a web site based approach, that is very unfriendly when it comes to interacting with the web at large.  Users may watch videos, at some designated web site (often for a fee), but they can do nothing else.  It is very much still centered on the legacy approach, the Web 1.0 implementation. A user cannot generally share the video with anyone via email, as their is no specific url to link to.  A blogger cannot embed a video on their site to show their visitors a specific race that they are discussing. A user cannot leave a comment on the race video so there is zero social interaction, no sense of community. And since whatever site that is streaming the video is probably working on an extreme budget, the video is often of a very low quality.

Let’s examine the benefits of transitioning to a Web 2.0 model, and instead of paying for a proprietary website solution –  i.e. what is possible using YouTube as the platform instead (on which CDI is the notable leader).  What becomes available?

Each racing video has an explicit url and can be shared via email, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Each racing video can be embedded easily in a wide variety of third party web sites, further extending the reach.

Viewers can comment on races. How much more interesting would it be to view the day’s replays if there were a few trip handicappers leaving comments each day?  It opens up the possibility for user-generated value add.

YouTube streams in up to 1080p, meaning the video quality is realistically only limited by whatever the track uploads.  Since using the platform is free, that is a strong incentive to use as high quality streaming as possible.

These are the most obvious advantages, but there are others.  YouTube has a rich API that can be accessed programmatically. A track that hosts its videos on YouTube need not let YoTtube be the only way of accessing those videos.  Any track could quite easily have a very structured interface on their site, consisting of pull-downs menus, calendar widgets, etc — similar to how most racing replays interfaces are done now — except they access the YouTube API and pull videos from YouTube.  One need not rely on visitors going to YouTube at all — but using them as a platform allows for a better on-site experience than visitors get now, at no recurring cost.

Although I should say the YouTube interface is not bad, it is just not what people are used to.  We’ll use CDI as the example.  They use a consistent naming convention for their replays, of TrackName, Date, Race #, for instance FAIR GROUNDS, 2010-01-10, Race 1.   If I type Fair Grounds 2010-01-10 into the YouTube search box, I get all the races from that day as results.  Not a bad way to go.  I have a YouTube widget on my homepage, so accessing racing replays for CDI tracks could not be easier, all I need to do is enter what I want and I’m watching a video 2 seconds later.  This is much faster than any other proprietary site based approach used anywhere else in racing, if a bit more free form.

YouTube is also increasingly ubiquitous.  Already, many can access YouTube on their televisions.  YouTube works on all major smartphones.  I have no idea if I can access any of racing’s proprietary replay sites on my phone, or on my TV, but I know I can access YouTube.  What’s more I know that YouTube will see to it that in five years everyone will be able to access YouTube, from any TV.  I know if racing used YouTube as a platform, and uploaded high def video I could watch replays on my smartphone, and on my 55″ flat screen in full blown 1080p.

Is that not just the sort of thing we should all be excited about, and falling all over ourselves to use?  Did I mention it’s free?  Racing has opportunities to do better with their use of APIs in other areas, such as tote odds, and hopefully, someday even charts and the like, but for now moving race replays over to a web platform that plays nicely with the rest of the web is an overdue development.

This is a guest post written by Raleigh, a  tech industry professional in Northern California.

Screenshot from equidaily.com

He thinks change will be at the forefront because people who grew up in the Internet generation are now old enough to be working and building new companies – these folks are connected and tech savvy, and they will make a huge difference in their industries. He also thinks frustration will rise, as baby boomers become older, and are less rich than they were last decade.

He says that this decade’s tech innovations will not be piecemeal: “It won’t look like the last one with a few bells and whistles added.”

In racing there is a whole lot of griping, which shows our frustrations. Any change, like the ‘Innovations of the Decade’ we looked at the last week or so, were primarily incremental. I think if we put our minds together and embrace new ideas – i.e. change in racing which will be much more than “a few bells and whistles added” – we might be better off.

Option one, change, sounds a bunch better than option two, incremental change to make our frustrations feel better.

Good luck, and a prosperous 2010 everyone.