All week we have been previewing the July Festival through the Smartform runner insights tables — reading each day’s most promising handicap by how a horse stood on the morning of its race, and bringing the breeding in only where it can answer a question the form cannot. The point is less the selection than what the data shows you on the way to one. Today, on the biggest card of the week, it shows quite a lot.

Today’s pick is the 2:52 mile handicap for three-year-olds — the race that ran for the last decade as the bet365 Mile and carries the Weatherbys name this year. Of all six of the festival’s big handicaps, this is the one that read best when we tested it: not just a form profile, but a genuine trainer-form angle and a mild draw lean that both survived being checked against years we had held back. There are notes on a couple of the day’s other races — the July Cup and the Bunbury — at the foot of the piece.

2:52 — Weatherbys Handicap

One mile, Class 2, three-year-olds, £50,000.

The winning shape here is the same improving three-year-old that has run through this whole week, with two additions that earned their place in testing. First, the profile: a lightly-raced colt who won last time and is stepping up in class, carrying a mark the handicapper has raised — the horse whose recent form has outgrown its rating. Second, the yard, used the useful way round. Nearly every winner of anything comes from a stable in form, so “warm yard” on its own tells you little. The negative is what earns its keep: a horse that fits the profile but whose yard is cold is one to strike out, and that filter did real work in both the years we held back. Third, a draw lean: in mid-sized fields the higher stalls have outperformed, by a few points, on a large sample. Today’s nine runners put us squarely in that mid-sized band — so today, the draw counts.

Stall	Runner	Price	Mark today (from)	Rivals beaten, last two	Class / last win	Yard form (runs)
1	Eklleem	4.5	87 (from 76)	100% / 67%	up 1, won LTO	64.1 (785)
2	Alfaraz	8.5	88 (from 88)	100% / 43%	up 2, won LTO	57.0 (928)
3	Moonfall (fav)	3.25	97 (from 90)	100% / 64%	level, won LTO	58.0 (143)
4	Wild Thoughts	11.0	89 (from 84)	86% / 100%	up 2, 2nd LTO	52.9 (78)
5	Sunset On Leros	34.0	95 (from 97)	27% / 13%	level, 12th LTO	52.9 (253)
6	Wechaad	5.5	95 (from 95)	79% / 81%	level, 7th LTO	64.2 (539)
7	St Anton	13.0	91 (from 91)	55% / 100%	level, 14th LTO	52.2 (1187)
8	Iron Lily	15.0	96 (from 97)	0% / 50%	down 1, 7th LTO	55.1 (188)
9	Tales Of Wisdom	11.0	99 (from 100)	7% / 100%	level, 28th LTO	60.5 (249)

Reading the columns. Mark today (from) shows today’s official rating and where it stood two runs back — so “87 (from 76)” is a horse raised eleven pounds as its form improved. Rivals beaten is the percentage of the field the horse finished in front of, last time and the time before. Yard form is how the stable’s runners have been performing on that same scale when brought back after a similar break, runs in brackets; 50 is par, and a small sample tells you little. Those trainer patterns are set out at betwise.co.uk/insights.

Eklleem is the profile in its clearest form. Four starts, won last time up in class, beat every rival, and the mark tells the tale — raised eleven pounds as the penny dropped. Haggas’s yard is the warmest in the race on a big sample. He is the horse whose rating is chasing his form rather than describing it. Moonfall, the favourite, fits it too — won last time, beat everything, a stable going well. And Alfaraz is the same shape at a bigger price, up two classes.

The interest is that the two trends point different ways. The form profile likes Eklleem, Alfaraz and Moonfall — who are drawn one, two and three, on the wrong side of a draw lean that, in a mid-sized field like today’s, has favoured the higher stalls. The tidy resolution would be a well-fancied horse drawn high, and there isn’t one: the three highest stalls all fall to the cold-yard reading. St Anton (stall seven) comes from a below-par yard with a negative booking pattern and was beaten a long way last time; Iron Lily (stall eight) is two months off and dropping in class; Tales Of Wisdom (stall nine) is from a warm Appleby yard but was tailed off last time and carries the coldest jockey booking in the race.

Which leaves the middle of the draw, and Wechaad in stall six — the most interesting horse on the page for anyone reading the trends rather than the tips. He is not the improver the profile is built around: he has not won and is not stepping up, he is the exposed, consistent sort. But he beat around 80% of his rivals in each of his last two, Roger Varian’s yard reads as warm as any here, and Ryan Moore takes the ride — and he sits a good deal closer to the favoured end of the draw than the three at the head of the market. Every instrument likes him a little; none of them loves him. That is its own kind of signal.

So the trends lay the race out like this: Eklleem the standout on form, drawn awkwardly; Wechaad the one the draw and the yard both nod at, without the winning-form angle; Moonfall the favourite bridging the two. Which of those matters most on the day is the judgement — and that part is yours. What the data has done is turn a nine-runner handicap into three horses worth the argument, and told you exactly why each is there.

Two others we looked at

A word on two more of today’s races, both because of what our reading could not do with them — which is as much a part of the picture as the race it could.

4:35 — Al Basti Equiworld July Cup (Group 1, 6f)

The festival’s centrepiece, and a race where the breeding tables — which read some of the meeting’s Pattern races quite nicely — have almost nothing to add. The July Cup is contested by horses who are already, to a one, bred for speed: the sire lines that win it are a tight little pool of the same fast names over and over. That is exactly why the pedigree does not separate them. When every runner is by a speed sire, the sire tells you nothing about who wins; the whole field has passed the same test. So we would not reach for a breeding angle here. This is a race to judge on the plainest thing there is — who is the best sprinter, in the best form, on the day — and to let the pedigree sit quietly in the background where, for once, it belongs.

3:25 — Betway Bunbury Cup (Heritage Handicap, 7f)

And then the Bunbury, the race we have spent more time on than any other and have the least to offer you about — which is itself the finding. We tried it every way we know. The preparation profile. The handicapper’s pen. Buried good runs from two or three starts back. Trainer and jockey form. Breeding. Two versions of a theory we rather liked, about horses well in against the best they have ever shown. And, because half the field arrives here straight out of Royal Ascot, whether the Ascot run held a clue. Every angle described the winner and fifteen losers equally well. The Bunbury is built to be exactly this — a big field of exposed handicappers the assessor has squeezed into a single furlong of ability — which is why it throws up its 25/1 and 33/1 winners and buries its favourites. If you play it, take a big price and enjoy it. We can tell you, with more evidence than we can tell you almost anything else this week, that we cannot tell you who wins it.

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That is the meeting. The mark paths, the rivals-beaten figures and the draw record all come straight from the Smartform data — run the same columns yourself in daily_runners_insights, set them against the trainer patterns at betwise.co.uk/insights, and you will see exactly the picture we did, including the two races today where the honest answer was that there was nothing there to find.

At Royal Ascot we read the meeting through the breeding tables. Across the July Festival we are leaning on a different part of Smartform — the runner insights tables — and bringing the breeding in where it can answer a question the form cannot. We have pointed both at the meeting’s races to see which are best suited to this kind of reading, and each day we pick one to read in that light.

Yesterday there were clearer candidates. Today took more thought, and the reason why is worth a paragraph of its own.

The obvious candidate was the 1:50, the ten-furlong Heritage Handicap for three-year-olds. It is a race we have looked at closely: seventeen runnings, fields averaging twelve, and a winner profile that holds up reasonably well — the lightly-raced sort who won or ran a cracker last time and is stepping up in trip or class. Then the declarations came out and it is a six-runner race. The smallest field in any of those seventeen renewals was seven. In a six-horse handicap a profile that narrows the field to two horses has not really narrowed anything, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise.

So we have gone to the 3:00 instead. It is a trappier race, and a more interesting one.

3:00 — Betway Trophy (Heritage Handicap)

One mile six furlongs, Class 2, four-year-olds and upwards, £100,000.

Straight away, the caveat. This race has only been run in its present form since 2018 — nine runnings. We built our reading from six of them and looked at the other two. That is not enough to call a profile tested, and we will not dress it up as one. What we have is a steer, and a coherent one.

Every winner in those six derivation years came into the race with a strong recent run behind them, a mark the handicapper had left alone or eased rather than raised, and stamina they had already demonstrated on the racecourse — a win at this trip or beyond, or a previous placing in this very race. This is not a plot-horse contest. It is a race for the proven stayer who happens to be in form.

The other thing that stands out is how kindly it treats its own. Live Your Dream won it twice. Oneforthegutter, who lines up again today, won it last year having finished second in it the year before. Horses who have gone well over this course and distance keep coming back and keep running well, which makes some sense over a mile and six at Newmarket: it is a searching test and some horses simply handle it.

Runner	Price	Age	Mark, last three runs → today	Rivals beaten, last two	Runs at trip (wins)	Course place strike	Yard form (runs)
Wine Dark Sea (fav)	2.0	4	75 → 78 → 83 → 83	100% / 100%	0	100%	53.0 (24)
Valedictory	4.0	4	84 → 87 → 87 → 92	100% / 62%	1 (1)	0%	57.2 (336)
Goblet Of Fire	7.0	6	119 → 83 → 83 → 90	100% / 50%	3 (1)	100%	63.4 (27)
Oneforthegutter	15.0	7	93 → 91 → 90 → 88	36% / 14%	10 (1)	40%	50.9 (592)
Majestic	15.0	8	94 → 92 → 90 → 90	83% / 50%	0	43%	64.4 (48)
Pole Star	21.0	4	89 → 89 → 88 → 86	9% / 67%	5 (2)	67%	53.4 (136)
Beylerbeyi	21.0	6	101 → 101 → 100 → 100	63% / 40%	0	100%	50.9 (592)
Asgard’s Captain	34.0	6	89 → 92 → 92 → 92	42% / 75%	1 (0)	100%	62.5 (35)
Real Dream	34.0	7	103 → 101 → 99 → 97	20% / 45%	9 (1)	100%	50.9 (592)
Roaring Legend	34.0	6	104 → 104 → 104 → 103	20% / 0%	5 (1)	0%	48.4 (11)

Forecast prices in decimal. Marks read antepenultimate → penultimate → last time out → today.

Reading the columns. Mark is the official rating the horse carried at each of its last three starts and the one it carries today. Rivals beaten is the percentage of the field the horse finished in front of last time and the time before — a fairer measure of a run than the bare finishing position. Runs at trip counts previous starts over a mile and six, with wins in brackets. Yard form is how the stable’s runners have been performing on that same rivals-beaten scale when brought back after a similar break, with the number of runs behind the figure in brackets; 50 is par, and a small sample tells you little. Those trainer patterns are set out at betwise.co.uk/insights.

A word about the 119

Goblet Of Fire’s mark three runs back reads 119, against 83 for the two starts either side of it. That is not a rating collapse. Given the yard, it will be a hurdles mark: the insights table carries whatever official rating applied to the horse’s last run, whichever code it was run under. Check race_type before you read a story into a number like that. It is the sort of thing that will trip you up exactly once.

The stamina question, and a warning about percentages

A mile and six is a genuine test, and three of these ten have never faced it. Wine Dark Sea, the even-money favourite, has never run beyond eleven furlongs. Nor has Beylerbeyi, dropping back from two and a half miles. Nor has Majestic.

This is precisely where you would want a pedigree to speak, and it is why we went and asked. Our experimental breeding tables carry, for every runner, how the sire’s progeny have performed over today’s distance, how the dam’s have, and how the cross of sire and broodmare-sire has — each with the number of runs behind the figure.

For Wine Dark Sea, the answer is silence. His dam has no progeny who have run at this trip. The cross has none either. His sire’s distance figure sits at 51.4 — par, on seventy-four runs, so we can trust that it is genuinely unremarkable rather than merely unknown. The pedigree does not tell us he stays. It does not tell us he doesn’t. It simply has nothing to say, and on the one horse in the race where a stamina read would be most valuable.

Which brings us to the number that does catch the eye, and the lesson in it. The sire-and-broodmare-sire cross behind Goblet Of Fire — Saxon Warrior over a War Front mare — shows 94.4% of rivals beaten at this trip. A stayers’ nick, firing. Except that the sample size beside it reads 2.

We went and looked at who those two runners were. Every runner from that cross to have gone a mile and six in the last five years is Goblet Of Fire himself. Two qualifying turf runs: second of ten at Goodwood last August, 88.9% of rivals beaten; and first of twelve at Newmarket this May, 100%. The mean is 94.44%. His Wolverhampton second does not count — the figure is for turf — and a 2024 Goodwood run does not count because he did not finish.

So the pedigree number is his own form, averaged, and handed back wearing a different hat. It is not independent evidence of anything. Read it without the sample-size column beside it and you would take it as confirmation that the breeding says he stays; in fact the breeding says nothing, and the horse’s own record says everything. Never read a percentage in these tables without the count next to it.

The reading

Strip the circular number away and Goblet Of Fire is left standing on exactly what this race has rewarded. He won over this course and distance in May, beating eleven. Three runs at the trip, one win, a hundred per cent course place strike. He won last time out, beating every rival, with a useful-run flag. He is, on the profile, the in-form proven stayer, and he is a 7.0 chance.

Two things give us pause and we would rather name them. He has been off for sixty-eight days. And the handicapper has put him up seven pounds for that win, which is the opposite of the eased mark our derivation winners carried. The yard reads warm but on twenty-seven runs, which is too few to lean on.

Valedictory is the other genuine fit. Won last time, beat everything, has a win at the trip, six starts, and the strongest stable-and-jockey combination in the race. Against him: one run at a mile and six to Goblet Of Fire’s three, and no course form whatsoever.

The favourite is the interesting one. Wine Dark Sea won last time and — unusually — races off an unchanged mark of 83, which is the shape of a horse the handicapper has not yet caught. He beat every rival in each of his last two. On yesterday’s three-year-old logic he would be the obvious answer. But this is not that race. He has never gone the trip, he is stepping up two classes, and, as above, nothing in the breeding will tell you whether he gets home.

And then Oneforthegutter, who won this race last year and was second in it the year before, available at 15.0 this afternoon with the worst recent form in the field — 36% and 14% of rivals beaten in his last two. He fails one half of the profile completely and passes the other half completely: ten runs at the trip, a course-and-distance record, and a proven liking for this specific race. Our reading cannot dismiss him and cannot recommend him. On a nine-year sample, we are not going to pretend that tension is resolved.

Goblet Of Fire is the pick, Valedictory the alternative, and the favourite carries a stamina question the data cannot answer.

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That is today’s “trends” pick. The mark paths, the rivals-beaten figures and the distance records come straight from the Smartform data — run the same columns yourself in daily_runners_insights, set them against the trainer patterns at betwise.co.uk/insights, and you will see exactly the picture we did, including the parts that did not work.

At Royal Ascot we read the meeting through the breeding tables. Across the July Festival we are using a different part of Smartform: the runner insights tables. We have pointed them at the meeting’s races to see which are best suited to this kind of reading, and each day we pick one to read in that light.

The tables doing the work are daily_runners_insights and its historical twin historic_runners_insights. Between them they carry a few hundred leak-free columns describing every runner exactly as it stood on the morning of its race: how its official mark has moved across its last three starts, what proportion of the field it beat each time, whether it stepped up in class, how long since it ran. Alongside those we lean on the trainer days-since-ran patterns — how a yard’s runners perform depending on the gap since their last outing — which you can see set out at betwise.co.uk/insights.

The method is deliberately slow. We took the meeting’s races one at a time, built a profile of the typical winner from the runnings up to 2023, wrote that profile down, and only then tested it against 2024 and 2025 — two years we had held back and not looked at. The results varied more than we expected. Some races read well. Some read loosely. Some have fields too small to test honestly at all. And one defeated every angle we threw at it.

Today’s pick is one of the ones that reads.

3:00 — Betway Handicap (Heritage Handicap)

Six furlongs, Class 2, three-year-olds, £100,000.

The trend you will see quoted this morning concerns the draw: nine of the last eleven winners came from stall eight or higher. We have looked at the draw over Newmarket’s summer sprint trips and have not found it to be significant. Eleven runnings is a thin sample, and when we tested a draw bias over six furlongs here against renewals we had held back, it did not survive. That is not to say there is nothing in it — only that we cannot find it, and we would not move a horse up or down on it.

What does matter is the direction of the handicapper’s pen. The insights tables carry each horse’s official rating not just for today but for each of its last three starts, so you can watch the assessor forming his opinion in public.

Look at the recent winners. Dancing Star came here in 2016 rated 75, then 80, then 89 — and won off 96. Quinault won in 2023 having gone 74, 74, 85, 90. Sergeant Wilko in 2024: 78, 85, 84, 87. Prince Of India last year: 77, 80, 84, 87. Every one was being put up, run after run. Every one won anyway.

That is the whole thing. In this race, over these years, the rising mark has not been a warning — it has been the evidence. The winner has tended to be the three-year-old improving faster than the handicapper can raise him. Whether that holds because young horses improve between runs quicker than an assessor can react, we cannot prove from the data; but by midsummer there is enough form on the page for the pattern to show.

Runner	Price	Mark, last three runs → today	Rivals beaten, last two	Runs	Yard form (runs)
Sea Cookie	9.0	— → — → 79 → 84	100% / 100%	4	56.6 (73)
Thunder Call (fav)	4.5	— → — → 85 → 91	100% / 100%	4	64.1 (783)
Red Spells Danger	7.0	79 → 79 → 89 → 93	95% / 100%	9	49.2 (848)
Calico Blue	7.0	— → 91 → 93 → 93	88% / 88%	5	64.2 (537)
Starmade	11.0	80 → 80 → 88 → 88	85% / 100%	6	52.0 (329)
River Spey	15.0	84 → 84 → 83 → 87	100% / 29%	8	59.5 (311)
Ten Carat Harry	9.0	97 → 101 → 101 → 101	92% / 40%	14	52.3 (113)
Man Of Vision	9.0	— → 87 → 90 → 90	62% / 90%	5	59.9 (247)
Jazl	13.0	— → 85 → 95 → 95	0% / 100%	5	57.8 (195)
May Angel	15.0	95 → 95 → 95 → 95	73% / 78%	7	62.0 (795)
Pilu	17.0	87 → 87 → 86 → 88	91% / 50%	5	45.0 (84)
Ghost Mode	26.0	98 → 97 → 96 → 94	50% / 11%	9	56.9 (926)
Mo Of Cairo	34.0	84 → 84 → 82 → 81	67% / 62%	7	50.7 (622)

Advertised is a non-runner. Marks read antepenultimate → penultimate → last time out → today; a dash means the horse had not yet been rated. Forecast prices in decimal.

Reading the columns. Mark is the official rating the horse carried at each of its last three starts, and the one it carries today — the handicapper’s opinion, revised in public. Rivals beaten is the percentage of the field the horse finished in front of last time and the time before; a fairer measure of a run than the bare finishing position, since eighth of twenty-eight is a very different afternoon from eighth of nine. Yard form is how the stable’s runners have been performing on that same rivals-beaten scale when brought back after a similar break, with the number of runs behind the figure in brackets — 50 is par, and a small sample tells you little.

Sea Cookie is the closest thing to the archetype. Four starts in his life. Won last time, stepping up two classes out of a Class 4, and put up five pounds for it. He has beaten every rival in each of his last two runs, has two wins in the last ninety days, and already owns a course-and-distance win. Lay him alongside Sergeant Wilko and Prince Of India and it is very nearly the same horse. The reservation is his yard’s figure, which reads well but on only seventy-odd runs — too few to lean on.

Thunder Call is the same shape and makes no secret of it. Won last time, raised six pounds, every rival beaten in each of his last two, four starts, and the strongest yard in the race behind him on a properly powered sample. The profile likes him and so does the market. Worth saying plainly rather than pretending otherwise: when the data and the betting agree, you are not being paid for the insight.

Red Spells Danger has the steepest curve on the card — 79, 79, 89, 93, fourteen pounds across three runs, with 95% and then 100% of his rivals beaten. On the form line alone he is arguably the most improving horse here. The one thing that gives us pause is his yard’s current figure, the coldest of the fancied runners, on a large number of runs. We should be straight that we have not tested whether a cold yard matters in this race — it did tell in another of the festival’s handicaps — so treat it as a raised eyebrow rather than a strike.

Then the other side of the ledger. Ten Carat Harry is top-rated on 101, a course-and-distance winner, seven wins at the trip from fourteen starts. He may well run a fine race. But his mark has not shifted across his last three runs, and he is the most exposed horse in the field — whatever the profile above is picking up, he is not it. Ghost Mode and Mo Of Cairo are travelling the other way entirely, drifting down the weights.

The profile points to Sea Cookie at a price and Thunder Call at a short one; Red Spells Danger is the improver with a question behind him. On the draw, we have nothing to add.

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That is today’s “trends” pick. The mark paths and the rivals-beaten figures come straight from the Smartform data — run the same columns yourself in daily_runners_insights, set them against the trainer patterns at betwise.co.uk/insights, and you will see exactly the picture we did, including the parts that did not work.