Handicapper's Corner: 2026 Queen Elizabeth II Challenge Cup (G1)

  

 

Handicapping Speed vs. Closers in a loaded QEII

By: Stuart Marc DeVoe, ThoroFan Handicapper

Saturday’s $750,000 Queen Elizabeth II Challenge Cup (QEII) attracted a full field of 11 3-year-old fillies who will travel 1 1/8 miles over the Keeneland lawn. The Grade 1 affair is featured as race 9 of 10, post time is 5:16 PM ET. The turf is expected to be firm, but rain later in the day may play a small part. 

The QEII at Keeneland is by invitation only. All the invitees have something on their dance card that warrants a chance to add this prestigious G1 as icing on the cake of an already good season. That means all the fillies belong in one respect or another. 

When analyzing a race for 3yo fillies in the fall, I like to see who is still developing and may have a forward move to produce. I measure that against those that may be more accomplished but perhaps have already run their best.  

There are a few fillies that have already run some fast races but that hasn’t scared anyone away. We have a full field of 11. We must ask ourselves if those who have run fast can reproduce those efforts or move forward?  Perhaps someone is ready to really jump up and run a cracker.

Let’s look at the field: 

1.   Haute Diva (30/1) Took on older in her last try where she was squeezed at the start. She made a bit of a run but passed tired foes.  The waters are just as deep here for her. 

2.  Luster (5/2)  Has looked nothing short of sensational beating up on the Canadians winning the Woodbine Oaks and King’s Plate in her last two. No matter the competition, she has done it VERY easily with fast speed figures. She will trip out with her high cruising speed have first run on the closers. Luster also owns a win over the course. 

3.  Tam Tam (4/1)  Has really come to hand this summer. Like Luster, she’s a winner her last two with forward position early. She did get beat in the Regret at CD by two of her foes in here at today’s distance.  However, she was hooked 3 wide the entire journey and got a bit late where the winner, Faithful Departed had an inside run. She, again like Luster, will have first run on the closers. 

4.  Faithful Departed (7/2)  Another who has had forward progression this summer. After winning the Regret at the end of May, she closed well into a slow pace running second in the Belmont Oaks, to Kensington Lane (IRE). Her run in the Saratoga Oaks was a winning one although she got tagged on the money. She did miss a start at Kentucky Downs with a bit of a fever but should be ready to roll here.  Can absolutely win this. 

5.  Turner’s Charm (20/1)  Will be making a late run here. I’m not sure she is as good as some of the other closers nor capable enough to catch some of the ones that will be forwardly placed. An outsider. 

6.  Braida (FR) (8/1) These Euro invaders are always dangerous. I never seem to be on the right side of judging their ability. Visually, she has a devastating kick. Two back she got bottled up and didn’t get a chance to show it. For comparison’s sake, the second-place finisher (Esna) in that event was an also ran in last week’s Flower Bowl at Belmont. In her last race, she looked buried on the rail but the sea parted, and she closed well to win clear. Her speed figures are competitive with the rest of the contenders. Gun to my head, I feel this year’s edition of this race is very salty and she may be a cut below our best. That said, I wouldn’t argue with anyone backing her, especially if she is close to her morning line.   

7.  Storm’s Wake (10-1)  Another who owns a win over the course winning the G2 Appalachian in the spring where she finally got a pace to close into. She looks pace dependent and hasn’t gotten that in her last two outings. On the right day, with the right trip, she could grab a slice. She will need to be longer than her 10/1 morning line to entice me however.  A good board option. 

8.  Lookin At Diamond (20/1)  She has had a diet of west coast racing where she’s been there or thereabouts. Her effort behind Tam Tam in the Del Mar Oaks was good. It was a big step forward and perhaps she can go forward from that again. She will have to do so just to run the figures a lot of these have already done. I respect her but don’t want to bet on her.

9.  Kensington Lane (IRE) (8/1) Projects to be on the engine just like she has in her two stateside efforts. She benefited from a slow pace in the Belmont Oaks back in July. She got pressed more out at Del Mar by Tam Tam and got late. Today, she’ll have Tam Tam again and Luster waiting to pounce. One or both of them will attack at some point as I don’t see an easy lead for her today. Can she hang on for a piece?  Perhaps. 

10. Deep Learning (12/1)  I don’t think we’ve seen the best of this one yet.  Her Saratoga efforts were good. She had the worst of trips of the top three in her last with a wide journey. The winner swooped them and the place horse never left the rail. Admittedly, she’ll need a forward move but that isn’t out of the question with these connections. A price play. 

11. Soloist (20/1)  Got the better of the trips against Storm’s Wake last month at Colonial. She gets Irad but an outside box. Perhaps he can work his magic but she seems a cut below these and will have to figure out a trip.  Pass.

SUMMARY 

What a good race! It looks like there is a strong pace presence and strong closers. But with only one horse, Kensington Lane (IRE), looking like a need the lead type I don’t expect the pace to be hot. 

Both Luster and Tam Tam can be forward and finish. They will have Kensington Lane in their sights. As good as Luster has looked, I don’t think we’ve seen the bottom of her. She is my pick to win. This distance may be as far Tam Tam wants but she will make the picture. 

I think one or both can hold off the strong closes from Faithful Departed, Braida (FR), Deep Learning and Storm’s Wake but they will need their best.  Price will dictate my bet.

THE BET:  (based on $100 wagered)

Assuming the morning line is accurate I cannot bet the top 3 choices together if I think they are close ability wise unless I bet small straight combinations, so my equity is intact.  Once you start boxing and spreading, you don’t make any $$.

Exactas:

$25 Luster – Tam Tam

$15 Luster – Tam Tam, Deep Learning, Storm’s Wake

Trifectas:

$5 Luster – Tam Tam – Faithful Departed, Braida (FR), Storm’s Wake, Deep Learning

$10 Luster – Tam Tam – Faithful Departed

Good Luck!

  

Handicapper's Corner: 2026 Coolmore Turf Mile (G1)

 

 From England to Keeneland: 

A British Twist on the Coolmore Turf Mile

 By: MaryJo Moncheski

Saturday’s $1.2 million Turf Mile Stakes (G1) is one of 11 stakes held during Keeneland’s 2026 Fall meet, and one of the weekend’s several Breeders’ Cup qualifiers contested across the country.

Listed as race 10, eleven 3-year-olds and older line up in the starting gate for a 5:48 PM post time. Let’s review the ones most likely to hit the board. 

I just got back from an amazing 10-day adventure in England. While I was there, I was fortunate to attend two UK races in one day: Royal Windsor Racecourse and Kempton Racecourse. I follow some UK racecourses, including both of these tracks, and have become familiar with many of the jockeys and trainers.

Cieren Fallon is one of the top riders in the UK and Ireland. He is not one to miss here flying in to ride 7. Lake Forest for Trainer William Haggas. Another UK-bred horse with a viable shot in this race is  1. Title Role with Jockey Johnny Velazquez and Trainer Brendan Walsh.

I really want to like 2. Brilliant Berti, but there isn’t enough consistency across the board for me, especially in G1 stakes.

If 4. Mercante had the speed with Blinkers Off, then I would give him a second look.

6. Plensa would be a huge upset considering he is jumping to a G1 stakes from a Restricted near-handicap stakes.

8. Kapuna is cutting back in distance and jumping up in class. I just don’t feel he has what it takes with this field.

I am automatically discarding 9. Zulu Kingdom as well. Other than not being a Chad Brown fan, I am not a fan of the lack of variety in distance this horse has run in past performances since May 3, 2025, when he won at 1 1/16 mile in the American Turf Grade I Stakes. One may argue consistently running at the same distance for more than five races in a row can create stagnation. He has won 8 out of 12 starts with consistently improving speed, however, Jockey Jose Ortiz picks up the ride, while Flavien Prat is riding elsewhere. Additionally, Zulu Kingdom lost to contender 5. Pass the Hat. Zulu Kingdom wins consistently as a presser or early pace horse. Pass the Hat is also a presser, early pace, and closer. My eye is going for the steady raters that get set up for a close. So my picks are 7-1-3-5. Let’s take a deeper look at them.

Top Pair: 7. Lake Forest with 1. Title Role

7 Lake Forest goes on top for the reasons listed above, plus the fact Cieren Fallon only has one mount, this race, the very last race of the day. For the distance reasons I listed for Zulu Kingdom, I give slack for the UK horses running near the same distances consistently as each track is different and may have elevation, unlike North American tracks. For 20 lifetime starts this horse has won over 20%. Trainer William Haggas isn’t sending Lake Forest to Keeneland unless he knows he has a winner. I am hoping he stays around 4-1 or goes longer given that Irad is back and riding reining Coolmore Turf Mile champ, Rhetorical.

1. Title Role takes the second spot for me. Jockey Johnny Velazquez is far from British, however, if there is anyone who knows versatility around the world and how to ride UK and Irish Turf horses, it’s Johnny V. The only reason this horse isn’t on top is his Beyer Speed Figure compared to the others. He is going back to a mile, which he clearly loves. Let’s hope he loves Keeneland’s mile!

Bottom Pair: 3. Rhetorical and 5. Pass the Hat

Reining champ 3. Rhetorical returns to his regular Jockey Irad Ortiz, Jr. coming a small layoff from the August 8^th G1 Four Star Dave Stakes at Saratoga. I am a little worried about his form, which is why I am not confident in putting him higher than third place. I debated actually moving him to fourth place, but he has a lot of experience handling the G1 class, as well as the Keeneland turf.

Lastly, I placed 5. Pass the Hat in fourth place because I do feel there is going to be a battle for the pace with Zulu Kingdom and one of them is going to tire out…or both. He is also moving up in class significantly and coming back in distance. The shorter distance from 1 1/16^th will surely help him. Pass the Hat also fits my rested criteria with several bullets (must be under 4.80 return, 10% win rate, speed, 30-60 days rested).

Bets:

$10 Win on #7

$2 exacta box on 7-1= $4

.50 trifecta box on 7-1-5= $3

Wildcards to include your P3 and P4: 8. Kapuna or .2 Brilliant Berti

Handicapper's Corner: 2026 Joe Hirsch Turf Classic (G1)

 

 

New Belmont, New Surface Questions: Previewing the Joe Hirsch Turf Classic

By: The Turk  

I've been handicapping for 40 years (I started in 1986 in Saratoga Springs when I spent the summer there studying at the Navy Nuclear Reactors in Ballston Spa), and I've been writing a horse racing blog since September 2008, 18 full years.  I haven't been as active in 2026 as past years, I'm like a circadian bug, I take handicapper "holidays" when I need a break and return when I'm ready.  

 

Thank you for reading and thank you to the good people at The Thorofan for indulging me.

 

This is the second weekend of racing at the rebuilt Belmont Park, which reopened September 18 after more than two years dark. The old grandstand — a 1968 concrete structure built for crowds that stopped coming decades ago was torn down and what replaced it is a five-story, 300,000-square-foot building that seats about 10,000 for an ordinary card and expands to 50,000 for the Belmont Stakes (btw- secondary ticket price market averages $550-$1,000 currently!)

The price was $555 million, most of it a $455 million loan from the state approved in 2024. Whether that was a good investment in a sport that has lost a track every seven months since 2000 is a question for another post. I'll note only that the money was spent building something smaller, which is at least an honest read of the audience and I'm hopeful it gives the Turk a modern facility to visit that  I felt was lost when Arlington Park was torn down needlessly.  

The main track is still a mile and a half, the only one of its kind in the country, and there are still two turf courses on 60 acres of new sod. A new one-mile Tapeta synthetic oval was installed to allow year- round racing and gave cover to the political hacks who closed Aqueduct.  

With the fake dirt, a race like this G1 Turf Classic can be transferred if the grass is unfit.  The Turk handicapped a lot of synthetic dirt races over the years as well, and the book isn't written yet on how this track surface will perform.  Stand by! Will this race run on turf, fake dirt or be cancelled or postponed?  We'll get to the weather in a moment.  

Joe Hirsch wrote about horse racing for the Daily Racing Form for 49 years, from 1954 until 2003, and when he retired the sport renamed its fall turf championship after him before he'd been gone a year. That tells you something about how the industry saw him and his loss. 

In many ways, and all due respect to current turf writers, he was the last of a kind: a beat writer who covered racing the way the newspapers of my childhood covered anything, by showing up. He was at the Derby every year for half a century. He founded the National Turf Writers Association in 1959. He wrote five books, including the definitive one on Calumet Farm, and for eleven years in the sixties and seventies he shared a Manhattan apartment with Joe Namath — the quarterback said Hirsch taught him how to dress and how to handle the press.

What made him different from the sportswriters of his time was that he had no interest in being the story. Retired DRF CEO/Editor/Publisher et al Steven Crist called him a global ambassador for the sport and a mentor to two generations of journalists, and when he died in January 2009 at 80, the Racing Museum eventually made him a Pillar of the Turf — a category reserved for people who built the sport, not just covered it.

Nobody writes about racing that way anymore, mostly because nobody employs anyone to. 

Now, the weather.  A nor'easter is a coastal storm that spins up when cold air from Canada meets warm Atlantic water, and it earns the name from the wind that blows in from the northeast, off the ocean.  Long Island takes it on the chin in these sort of conditions, with rain, sustained gusts, tidal flooding, and the storms tend to sit for a day or two rather than blowing through.

There is one arrives Friday evening. The forecast calls for moderate-to-heavy rain through Saturday, with 30-to-50 mph gusts in Nassau County, and the heaviest rain Saturday evening into Sunday. Post time is 5:19. The Turf Classic will be run on the leading edge of the worst of it.

Three things can happen, and I'd handicap (perhaps more accurate than my horse handicapping) them like this:

Run on the turf, yielding or soft:  9-5 that  NYRA doesn't cancel for rain. But these are brand-new courses on brand-new sod, ten days old, and I doubt they'll risk them.

Off the turf to the Tapeta at a mile and three-sixteenths: 6-5. The conditions say so explicitly, and a downgrade to G2 is possible. This would gut the field's distance edge and hand the race to whoever handles synthetic. Pride of Arras won on Polytrack at Kempton last out. El Cordobes is 1-for-2 on it. Far Bridge and Asbury Park have never seen it.

Canceled or postponed: 3-1. NYRA has pulled cards for wind before, and 50 mph is the number where that gets discussed.  If they don't do it for the horses, they should at least consider the fans and the back-of-the-track staff that has to work in it and commute to it.  

Ok, so let's pretend the race will be run.  I am going to assume it's on fake dirt for the purposes of this handicap, since it seems unlikely that the new sod, if heavy, would be safe for the horses or worth putting the horses or course at risk.  

How do I look at horses that have some Timeform, some Beyer?  This is something you will deal with every year as Breeders' Cup approaches.  The weakness is what the two systems measure. Beyer is a time figure. Timeform is a handicapper's judgment of merit, adjusted for weight and age. A horse who beats a good rival in a slow race gets a big Timeform number and would have earned a modest Beyer. The bridge gives you the typical gap, calibrated on two horses. It doesn't give you the gap for any one race.

Three of the seven have been running overseas, and Pride of Arras has never started in North America. Beyer figures don't exist for foreign races, and you can't straight-line compare Timeform and Beyers. 

The DRF prints a Timeform Rating on every foreign line, and that's how I build a correction. Timeform and Beyer are different scales, but two horses in this field have run under both within the last eighteen months. El Cordobes's best Timeform is 115 against a best Beyer of 105. Fort George's is 114 against 101. That's a gap of 10 to 13, so I've subtracted 12 from every Timeform figure and plotted the result as an open diamond. Same recency colors, different shape, so you can see at a glance which marks are measured and which are estimated.  It's small sample sizes with one race, but it's a good quick and dirty, and I've seen it hold up pretty consistently.  

The strength is that the bridge comes from the field itself, not a rule of thumb, and you can check it against the chart. Pride of Arras's last two runs convert to 105,  right where El Cordobes runs.

Taking a look at some recent video.

15 August 2026; SAR 1 1/2 Miles  Christophe Clement Stakes G1 on Yielding Turf.  

5 September 2026; Kempton (GB) 1 1/2 Miles September Stakes G3 on fake dirt

28 March 2026; GP 1 1/2 Miles Pan America G3 on firm turf.  

5 September 2026; KD 1 1/2 mile Turf Cup G2 on firm turf

While I like to stick to current video, a look at last year's Breeders' Cup Turf gives a look at El Cordobes (Ire) against a big and talented field.  

1 November 2025; DMR 1/1/2 mile Breeders' Cup Turf G1 on firm turf.  

 

 

It's a bit of a quandary, I focus on handicapping very analytically and Saturday's race could very well be, in technical terms, a S**t show.  This is how I see the race on artificial dirt.  

I like Far Bridge.  The trainer has won 20% of the time on +180 day layoff, he's got a good pedigree for fake dirt too.  A journeyman in the best way.  El Cordobes (Ire) joins Far Bridge as the top two in the race.  13 months since his last win, a long layoff after a failed Doha trip, I'll like him better next time out.  

My next layer down has Fort George (GB), Program Trading (GB) and Pride of Arras (Ire).  I like Fort George to possibly win and I like Program Trading and Prince of Arras to be in the Trifecta/Superfecta mix with one of them possibly in exacta.  

To my own peril, I'm essentially tossing Minerat Station and Asbury Park.  

I don't read media coverage of horses or races before I handicap as I'm too susceptible to external bias, but here's what DRF is saying about Saturday's race.  

Have fun, stay dry, Turk's Out!