The DRF online Archive has been down for months now

[Calzone Lord]

I'm pretty glad I spent an hour or so a day for over a year reading and studying the on-line archive that had copies of DRF's going back to 1896.

It also was the main driving force allowing a retrospective speed figure to be applied for races across all generations using modern speed handicapping methods, and also based as much on subsequent form as prior form. The commercial figures of today obviously need to be made right away, and subsequent form can't be accounted for because you can't see the future. And the information within result charts and the running times are WAY more accurate than I foolishly thought they'd be. Horse racing was BIG at one time. And a lot of care was put into the timing of the race and chart calling before the official timer came to be.

I developed a very great appreciation for two of the writers from the early 1900's who were not only a hundred years ahead of their time, but one of them (Vosburgh) unquestionably had a better understanding of horse racing almost 100 years ago than your above average horse racing writer has today.

I hated the writing and coverage of some time periods in the DRF. There were some good writers working in the 1960's, 1970's, and 1980's -- but their type of coverage was not the type I appreciate...and a lot of times they showed a very poor understanding of horse racing.

The DRF badly tailed away from being a paper geared for handicappers to a paper geared for general horse racing. And from writers who were brutally opinionated and willing to publish gossip all the time ... to writers who just plain lacked balls and didn't deliver much material that would interest me.

I would love to see the Archive restored. But, if not, at least I got several hundred if not over a thousand hours out of it...free of charge.