The big races come thick and fast at Royal Ascot, with a decent smattering of big handicaps among them. That is "big" in terms of field size as well as prestige and prize money where the handicaps are concerned.
Wednesday's handicap highlight is the Royal Hunt Cup, due off at 16:25 BST. The race is so popular that it not only has 30 declarations most years, but three reserves have been included in recent times in case of late defections.
Such contests are close to unique in the British Racing Calendar and therefore lend themselves more than most to looking at historical "trends".
Trends are fine, even with me, providing they are researched properly. That means taking the performances of all contenders into account and measuring them in a way that is meaningful.
It is not enough to consider simply whether a horse won or lost, but how well it won and how badly it lost. Any findings also need to be placed in the context of opportunity and expectation.
It is not much use knowing that, say, four-year-olds have won a race five times out of 10 without knowing how often they could have been expected to win the race in any case.
There are many plausible ways to measure performance, including percentage of rivals beaten and actual rating compared to expected rating. For the Royal Ascot handicaps I have used average cumulative lengths beaten after a stop-loss has been applied, then converted that into pounds.
In the six years since the Royal Hunt Cup resumed on the new Ascot track, four-year-olds and five-year-olds have performed better than par by in the region of a length, or 2 lb to 3 lb.
There has been little in it in terms of the marks off which horses have run, with the notable exception of horses running off between 100 and 103 (near, but not at, the top of the handicap). These have outperformed par by more than three lengths or nearly 9 lb.
These horses (23 of them) have included two winners, in Mr Aviator in 2008 and Forgotten Voice in 2009, three seconds and a third.
Being young and fairly good has been no bad thing in the Royal Hunt Cup in recent years. On these two criteria alone, Bonnie Brae (a five-year-old due to run off a mark of 100) could be considered something of a standout.
But she gets marked down on one remarkably strong criterion, and that is the draw.
Horses have run well from what is now a low draw (the draw in races prior to 2011 needs to be reversed to allow for the change in the system of numbering in March of that year), but nowhere near as often as might be expected.
Bonnie Brae is drawn in stall 6, with one of those drawn below her among the reserves.
The Royal Hunt Cup is almost unique, but not quite. The Britannia Handicap, run later in the week for three-year-olds on the same course and distance, is pretty similar and has had similar field sizes.
Combining the data from these two races, normalising for the slightly smaller margins in the Britannia than in the Royal Hunt Cup, and rounding to include adjacent stalls gives the following draw biases from 347 runners:
Stalls 1 to 3, -2 lb; stalls 4 to 6, -4 lb; stalls 7 to 9 -1 lb; stalls 10 to 12, -1 lb; stalls 13 to 15, 0 lb; stalls 16 to 18, -2 lb; stalls 19 to 21, -2 lb; stalls 22 to 24, +3 lb; stalls 25 to 27 +5 lb; and stalls 28 to 30, +8 lb.
Step forward the horse drawn in stall 33 (who will run from stall 30 once defections/reserves are taken out). Prince of Johanne is not a "perfect fit" on trends in that he is a six-year-old, but he has the right sort of ability and what could be a plum draw.
Last year's Cambridgeshire winner goes well in a big field on a straight track and posted a lifetime best last time when beaten a nose at York off a mark just 2 lb less. He looks like being available at 20 or bigger on Betfair: I reckon you could do a lot worse.
Recommendation: 1 pt win Prince of Johanne, Royal Hunt Cup (Wednesday)
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