This was one of our favorite puzzles, and definitely one of the most challenging for our treasure hunters. Race forms are generally loaded with data, so there are plenty of opportunities to hide a message. We tried to make this puzzle look as much like a genuine racing form as possible, with only critical difference, something you’d absolutely never see in a real form.
The fact that every horse is a Bob Seger song is just a distraction. We were musing through puzzle ideas one day, and someone said, “Have you ever noticed that most Bob Seger song titles would make great race horse names?” Some of our puzzle solvers found some great logic to make Bob a key, though, looking for connections to Detroit, years of song release, etc.
This is an excerpt from the racing form — it’s the recent race history from a particular horse.
Each row is a race, and those four cells at the end of each row indicate the horse’s position at different stages of the race. The exponential number shows how many lengths behind the leader the horse was.
For example, in the first race, one quarter of the way through, this horse was in fourth place, and was one horse length behind the leader. By the halfway point she was in third place, but was four lengths behind the leader. Three quarters of the way through she was in second, but still four lengths behind the leader. Then she apparently got passed by competitors, finished in fourth place, five lengths behind the lead horse.
Note the second race: at the three quarter mark, this horse was in first place. On a real racing form you wouldn’t see an exponent, because by definition, the horse in first place cannot be behind the leader.
So, there are two superfluous numbers in this example. In the second race, three quarter mark we have a 3 above a first place signifier, and in the third race, halfway through, there’s a 4 above a one.
Those are the first two digits of another set of coordinates. Go through the form and find all those extra digits, and you get 34.996667, -91.988611, a location near Austin, Arkansas. Three Big Picture coordinates down, one to go…
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