Hot Cash

Over the middle distances—seven furlongs to a mile—Hot Cash is a different horse. He has won 2 of 3 races at that trip, a win rate of roughly two-thirds that towers above his overall record. That kind of specificity matters. It tells you the trainer knows something. Jack Channon, the man behind Hot Cash at West Ilsley, is not a trainer prone to guessing. His yard has sent out 46 winners already this season, and he has been notably bullish about this horse's potential. When Channon took a chance and entered Hot Cash in the Derby, it wasn't on a whim. The horse had only two runs the previous year—both significant. A winning debut at Epsom in July 2024 was followed by a fourth-place finish in a Group 3 race at Deauville, the kind of company that separates the ordinary from the genuinely interesting.

What makes Hot Cash worth watching now is the gap between ambition and recent reality. His last win came at Carlisle fourteen months ago, and he has not won in his last six races. Most of those outings have been competitive—two second-place finishes, an eighth, a tenth—but nothing has clicked. The form is not disastrous; it is frustrating. Channon's approach has been methodical. When Hot Cash wasn't eligible for certain races, the trainer ran him in another opportunity to keep the horse sharp and in work. It is the approach of someone who still believes there is a better version of this horse waiting to emerge, even if the scoreboard has not caught up yet.