To be honest, it’s been a bit mental this year. Last week, with Royal Ascot, was the final glorious chapter of a ridiculously busy first half of 2026 for yours truly.

The sport has been amazing, the punting tricky.

And that’s a fair summary of the Royal Ascot just gone.

As Tony Stafford highlighted in his Monday Musings this morning, 22 of the 35 Royal races were won by half a length or less – you don’t get more competitive than that!

One of the most exciting performances – certainly in the juvenile ranks – came from Orthodox in Saturday’s Norfolk. It’s a little hard to see in the image but his sectional data is the straightish line close to the dotted line. This is our new (coming very soon) ‘normalised’ sectional view and it makes it much easier to see what horses did.

By way of contrast, I’ve added the early leader, Through The Years, to the chart. We can clearly see that one went much too fast early and was on vapours from a quarter mile out. I expect the new sectional format will appear in the results within the next fortnight, potentially this week (depending on testing).

Royal Ascot 2026: Big Thanks

Before I share what else is coming, a big shout out to the guys who helped me through last week. In the good old bad old days I would personally write full previews of the seven races a day for the first four days of the Royal meeting (and at Cheltenham, too).

Candidly, I’m not up to that any more and, also candidly, some of the quality suffered from the dilution of my efforts. So I really value the help those experts give me.

King of last week’s hill – it will be a different guy next time, that’s how it goes with tiny sample sizes – was Sam Darby. On the opening two days of the meeting, Sam highlighted winners at 25/1 and 28/1, one of them paying 59/1 on Betfair!

Sam used to work with me here at geegeez and you can find some of his old articles here, just type ‘darby’ into the search box. These days he runs his own (very successful) advisory service called Winning Post Racing Tips.

It’s a value based service so, obviously, good runs and bad runs – you can’t pick 25/1 and 28/1 winners without sometimes going a while between drinks. If you think you can, you’re wrong – and if anyone tells you you can, they’re lying and trying to get your money.

Back to business

And gratitude also to Gavin Priestley (consistently finding winners with his trends-based Festival Trends service), David Massey (these days mainly Trackside for his paddock-watching service), Rory Delargy (with David, the other half of Racing Consultants, and just about the most ear-worthy podcast guest around) and, of course, Dave Renham (whose thoughts illuminate geegeez and are many people’s go to article of the week).

These days, I literally couldn’t do it without them – so I’m very grateful for their support. Do check ’em out if you appreciated them, too.

And, of course, I remain extremely thankful for your support. We’ll only do this stuff for as long as it’s interesting to you.

Long form seemed to die some time towards the end of the last century (!), so in many respects we’re a bit old skool; but I’ve always wanted to take readers on a journey: to entertain, I hope, and also to offer some bits and bobs that might useful in your own picking, and on a more general basis than simply the race in question.

Like I say, that’s a pretty unfashionable remit these days, but then I guess geegeez.co.uk does rather shun the catwalk in the main. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed our efforts, and thank you again, again!

ALMOST READY… QT2.0 (or, actually, 1.99)

Jeez, it’s been a long time coming. There are just too many boring reasons to mention as to why the arrival of an upgraded Query Tool has taken so long. Finally, it’s close but there’s still some testing and a bit of styling work to do.

So far, the data is checking out and I’ll be excited to share QT2.0 before too long. Actually, it’s more like QT1.99 because I really want to refresh the look and feel, which is a bit dated these days. But I don’t want any further extensions to the delays on release, so we’ll do the UI (user interface) after getting the content out to you.

One thing which still needs focus is performance: it needs to be quick enough as well as much more functional, so we’ll be spending time getting that as good as we can, mindful that adding a ton of new variables will have a bearing.

Summary

The summary is that it’s been a very hard slog this first half of 2026, but we’re not relenting. The small sectional results update and the much, much larger upgraded Query Tool are imminent… and then there’s a stack of further changes on the horizon. As well as being knackering, it’s also very fun!

I can’t wait to share these with you.

Stay lucky!

Matt

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