Of the last 59 horses to enter the Derby (I don't have any earier data - Bold Forbes is reaching way back...at least you did not mention War Admiral) that I subjectively classified as front-runners (loosely defined as those that are within about 1 length of lead or closer at first call in every route race in which they performed well), only 2 have even hit the board: Spend A Buck (nice play, I didn't have him) and Winning Colors (although she was borderline and technically you could argue that she had shown the ability to lay off the pace in races prior to the Derby).

Of those two, I would say that Spend A Buck was simply brilliant and "freaked" in the Derby and that Winning Colors was pretty good and very lucky (allowed to set relatively slow fractions in an unusually slow-paced, slowly-ran Derby thanks to some questionable riding tactics).

The computer says that this is a statistically significant factor (for the Derby - not in general) and the performance of the Derby model suffers if you don't include it.

Then again, who trusts computers...I think I am going to bet it all on War Admiral, whoops, I mean War Emblem...:-)

As Thoreau once said, "Men have become the tools of their tools."

Chris