By Dick Jerardi
After 19 races over 21 months, Speightster Red had exactly one win, a $25,000 maiden claimer at Pimlico on June 19, 2021. Fast forward four summers and Speightster Red has won more races (five) at Parx through the first half of 2025 than any other horse.
Now 7-years-old, Speightster Red, who has made his last 37 starts at Parx, has been claimed 13 times by 10 different trainers. Robert Bailes, who had the horse at the start, re-claimed him two races after he lost him in 2021. Lupe Guerrero claimed Speightster Red off Parx Hall of Famer Scott Lake in 2023 and had the gelding for 22 races. Two races after losing him to another Parx HOF, Richie Vega, Guerrero took him back. After losing him again near the end of last year, Guerrero took Speightster Red back a third time two races later.
Enter Michael Pino who claimed Speightster Red on Feb. 5. Naturally, he lost him two races later and promptly claimed him back in the very next race. Everybody, it seems, loves Speightster Red. And why not?
After 67 starts, the horse has 15 wins, 15 seconds, 10 thirds and earnings of $386,105. When the horse has gotten a Beyer of 80 or more, he is 5-for-5 with a total margin of 32 3/4 lengths. Even with all those wins, Speightster Red was still eligible for the first-level allowance that went as Monday’s ninth race. He had won his last four races, the previous two in blowouts. The bettors made him 7-5. And Speightster Red gave a rare flat performance, last early and never really a threat, finishing fifth, nearly 8 lengths behind the winner.
“He’s been real good,” Pino said. “He’s been winning, four in a row. Every horse, they’re going to throw one (clunker), and he did it today. He’s just been a good sound horse, a good solid horse, a little disappointed, but I know he’ll regroup.”
Speightster Red was originally purchased for $85,000 at the Keeneland January 2019 Horses of all Ages sale. He made the races 20 months later and has been running ever since.
His sire, Speightster, went 3-for-3, including a win in the Dwyer Stakes, in 2015 for trainer Bill Mott and owner Win Star. He was off nearly a year before finishing far back in a Churchill Downs stake, his final start.
Speightster’s best son is 2024 Breeders’ Cup Sprint winner Straight No Chaser. Two of his most consistent sons, each with 15 wins, are Speightster Red and 2024 Parx Horse of the Year Spikezone.
Proving again that breeding is an inexact science, Speightster Red’s dam, Denali Red, was 0-for-5 with earnings of $319 in a very brief career.
Guerrero won $169,420 with Speightster Red. Pino has not won that much in five races (three wins) with the horse, but there was no doubt he wanted him back for owner John Chamatsos after losing him.
“When we lost him, I called the owner and said `let’s take him back, he looks like he’s getting good,” Pino said. “He’s been good to us.”
Really, Speightster Red has been good to just about everybody, and just about everybody has had him at one time or another. Even the best have a bad day and that would include Pino, who was 0-for-5 Monday after an 0-for-5 previous Wednesday. He did have four seconds and two thirds during the winless streak. Despite that, he has 50 wins at Parx, but, after the brief “slump,’’ he is “down” to 38 percent winners at the meet, with 69 percent in the money.
“Everything is coming together, but I know how this business is,” Pino said of his year so far. “You got to take a punch like today. Hopefully, we can continue it. It’s gone longer than I thought it would.”
True for the trainer and true for Speightster Red, the horse that took a while to learn how to win, but learned so well that he just earned two of the best Beyer figures of his career in starts 65 and 66.
