Derek Simon started writing his handicapping book more than 15 years ago. It’s finally out. Pace Matters: How Speed Rations Can Help You Win at the Races is on sale now on Amazon, and Simon, a horse racing podcast pioneer and longtime data handicapper, joined PTF on the In the Money Players’ Podcast to explain what’s in it.
What speed rations measure
Simon’s figures don’t rate how fast a horse ran. They rate how it spent its energy. “It’s really a way of looking at the distribution of a horse’s energy throughout the race,” he said.
There are two numbers:
- Early speed ration (ESR): how fast a horse runs, relatively speaking, in the early stages. Lower is better.
- Late speed ration (LSR): how fast it runs in the late stages. Higher is better.
The scale is built to be read in lengths. A horse with an ESR of minus 3, Simon said, is about five lengths faster early, relatively speaking, than one with an ESR of minus 8. That’s his main break from the feet-per-second approach in Tom Brohamer’s Modern Pace Handicapping, which he admires but finds hard to read at a glance: when one race is 53% early and another is 51.2%, “that might be a big difference, but it sure doesn’t look like it.”
His favorite example is Rachel Alexandra at 4. Her early speed rations went from around minus 8 to minus 2 and plus 2 that season, he said, a sign she was being ridden differently, and it didn’t give her any more kick.
Let the race tell you what it needs
Simon doesn’t like rules of thumb for a class of race, like what wins $35,000 claimers for non-winners of two. Those are usually built on tiny samples. Instead, the figures for a track and surface show what a race requires: juvenile races lean on early speed, turf routes on late speed, and turf sprints, he noted, look a lot like dirt, with plenty of quick ESRs.
That’s also why he won’t adjust turf figures to match dirt. “It’d be like looking at an NBA player’s stats and then trying to adjust how he would do in the NFL,” he said. “Dirt and turf are not comparable.”
Bankroll: smaller than you think
The book isn’t only about pace. Simon spends a lot of time on money management, starting with the Kelly criterion, which he says most players misunderstand. “It is literally for optimization of your bankroll. And that’s where it ends. It doesn’t give you an edge.”
Two of his points:
- Volatility isn’t danger. With favorites winning about 38% of the time, any approach with a price component will have long losing streaks. The real danger, he said, is losing profit by mixing in plays that lose money just to smooth out the streaks.
- You need bigger samples. Writing the book changed his own thinking: with fewer than about 1,000 plays, he said, results don’t tell you much unless your edge is very large. He now bets 1% to 2% of his bankroll per play.
He also says a player with no real edge and $100 to spend is mathematically better off putting it all on one horse. Once you do have an edge, that’s when to bet small and stick to a staking plan. And he kept the math readable on purpose: after Mark Cramer read a heavy chapter on confidence intervals, Simon cut it from the book entirely.
CAWs and late money
Simon calls knowing the final odds “the single most difficult thing in today’s game,” and the book includes a simple projected-odds formula he hopes readers will improve on. But he doesn’t think computer-assisted wagering means players can’t win. He does want tracks to enforce the rules on late betting, and he told players to watch for strange show-pool bets at smaller tracks.
What’s next: an AI handicapping app
Simon credits AI with getting the book finished, because it let him run tests far faster than his old Excel setup. Now he’s building an app around his figures. Users will be able to download an AI prompt built on the metrics he defined, then add their own touches. He’s still working through data licensing before anything is released. Updates will be on his site, derekdsimon.com.
Get the book: Pace Matters by Derek D. Simon on Amazon.
Quotes from Derek Simon on the In the Money Players’ Podcast with PTF, Nov. 11, 2026.
