Southwest Thoughts - Tapiture & Strong Mandate

I've watched the video a bunch while making my notes.  Here are my thoughts, which are pretty much the same as everyone else:

Tapiture got a great trip and did what a horse should do with that kind of trip by pulling away in the stretch.  I think Santana won that race going into the first turn when he held his spot on the rail.  Tapiture was a little green in the stretch and will have some distance questions to answer going forward, but he looked good today.

Strong Mandate drifted out and bumped another right out of the gate, then altered course on the 1st turn to be even wider, he was 4 wide on the 2nd turn and chased hard down the stretch.  I do like the determination he showed to keep running considering the trip.

Unfortunately, the only other time the Southwest was run at 1-1/16 miles in the last 20 years was on a Sloppy track.  So, I don't have a final time to compare it to from a historical standpoint.  But, the average time for the 1-1/16 miles Rebel on a fast track is 1:43.99 out of 18.  That is roughly a second faster than Tapiture ran today (1:44.95).  However, one thing is for sure Tapiture and Strong Mandate were by far the best of these.