Assuming the field stays intact (which nowadays seems like a big assumption) with 18 horses they will leave the first gate and last gate open, so Tiz the Law will actually be in gate 18 (and if just one scratches, I think they leave gates 1-2-20 open so he will likely start in gate 18 anyways). It will be Honor A.P. in the 17 hole then trying to buck history 90 years of history. With their new fancy starting gate, it seems fitting that the first Kentucky Derby winner from that gate will be from post 17 - the only post yet to produce a winner in that race. They just used the new gate in race 2 o Tuesday for a 10f MSW at CD as a test and from the head on, you can see that post 1 is still offset from the rail so if they had a full 20 horse field that horse literally starts right at the rail and has to make a right turn while most of the horses on the outside are making a left turn.

I think you have to weigh the chances of a horse being caught wide from an outside post with the chances that a horse will bumped around on the inside. At least with the ground loss you know what you are going to get most of the time - you take your chances on the inside. In the Derby, these two things tend to counterbalance each other in some cases. Also, depending on the horse, the length of time in the starting gate could be a negative factor. They will load in pairs with 1-9 simultaneously loading with 10-18. So if you are in those early loaded gates, you will be standing for a longer period of time. It is difficult to predict who will be the recipient of a bad trip – who would have ever thought Thunder Snow would come out of the gate like it was the rodeo? Some horses have had fabulously clean trips from the inner posts and of course having a bit of gate speed helps here but it is always a crapshoot.

If you look at all the races in the 2000’s, winners have come from all over the place except the inside. The last winner from the inside three posts was Real Quiet in 1998. Here are the number of winners from each post in the 2000’s. It is interesting that 5 and 15 have 1/3 of the wins between them:
[b]
Winners – Post Position[/b]
0 – 1,2,3,6,9,11,12,14,17
1 – 4,10,18,19,20
2 – 7,8,13,16
3 – 15
4 – 5

Here are the number of winners for each post position since they instituted the starting gate at Derby in 1930.

[b]PP-Wins[/b]
1-8
2-7
3-5
4-5
5-10
6-2
7-7
8-8
9-4
10-9
11-2
12-3
13-5
14-2
15-5
16-4
17-0
18-2
19-2
20-1