Wow, what a great race the Spiral was, I am mad as hell at myself for not making the journey down there to see it. RequestFP really impressed me, what a gutty horse, but Jerry already said it best, he is not the right type for the derby. He has had a tough campaign already, I don't see anyway he can carry it all the way thru to CD. He could run well in the Bluegrass if they choose that, because Keenland is also an extreme speed favoring surface.
Perfect Drift was impressive, the only off the pace winner on the entire card, raced against an enourmous speed bias. Reminded me of Alannan winning at Keenland last spring against a huge bias and then he came back to run huge on the derby undercard at a big price. The biggest problem here is the spacing for PD, sounds like the connections want to run him again before the derby. This will by mean by Derby time a stretch of 4-5 races with only 3 weeks rest in between. This could be a problem, but we will have to wait and see how stressful the last prep is.
Azillion was also impressive and appears to have more potential, I don't count him out yet either, but there are the same questions with race spacing coming in. My favorite spacing line is being taken by those horses who are racing on April 6, a nice month to train up to the derby. Horses I rank as contenders racing that day are Repent, USSTinosa, and TB Derby winner Equalize. Saarland races the next week, but should be OK for the derby off 3 weeks given that he will not have had a taxing spring. Not a whole lot else I can see coming out of the April 13 races, there will lots of pretenders I'm sure, but not horses that will be ready for their best effort come May 4.
I keep hearing in the press about no horse winning the derby off 6 weeks rest in 50 years or something. Is this really a big problem, is it that tough to keep a horse fit? I would much rather see Perfect Drift and Azillion train up to the derby, but that's not likely to happen given the lures of large purses in these derby preps. Time will tell....
