Staggered starts

[teecee]

Reasons this idea may work...1 Overcoming the reasons it wouldn't work.
Reasons it wouldn't work presuming it is an attempt to have all the horses running the same distance of a race.
1. the construction and operation of a barrier catering for such a situation would need to be exclusive to the race distances run at each individual track.
2 A horse running a 200 metre bend from gate 2 will run between 5 and 10 metres more than that in gate one and so on across the track. This is then multiplied from each barrier position outwards then gain by the number of turns the horses make in a race....variable...
3. THe angle of the barrier to cater for the space needed in each position would be that determined by the hypotenuse of the triangle making up that angle.
When you take into account all positions across the gate (say 7) you end up with a much longer length gate unbalanced by the placement of the barrier load behind a vehicle travelling around bends at min 42km/h. The arms would need to be so long that a real possibility of touching the track creating the vehicle to spin around. Have you ever seen a mibile vehicle do a 180 when the tip of the barrier grounds. It's not a pleasant site.!!!
When the start is reached and the arms fold up the circle created by its length the inside arm is quite considerable.

[JanellePeter]

Thanks teecee. Good points.
1. Yes the starting device would absolutely need to suit different tracks and distances. A starting device would therefore need to be designed to be adjustable.
2. I suggest the staggered start could only cater for the first bend if a mobile device was to be used for starts. This would give time for horse to find positions based on their early speed.
3. You can't limit your thoughts of what a starting gate already looks like. Let's pretend the current mobile device didn't exist and you wanted to do a staggered start. It couldn't be like the current setup for the reasons you described. My thoughts were of a long straight structural member towed directly behind a vehicle on the inside of the track with light weight perpendicular arms of different lengths protruding. When the starter releases the horses the arms would fold up into the air. As noted in 1, the arm positions would have to be adjustable along the structural member. There is a benefit in this method. There would be no vehicle in front of the horses.
There are still a lot more questions to be answered but I would love to see it trialled somewhere to understand other shortcomings and perhaps solve them.