The Long Journey to Maximum Velocity

It's just like Wayne Lukas used to tell him. “One of these days you're going to get smart,” Lukas would say. “And you'll quit that. And come over to the Thoroughbred business.”

This was when Bill Childs was still in the Quarter Horse game, and Lukas had already made the switch that transformed our sport.

“Well, you're right,” Childs told Lukas. “I'd love to. But man, it just takes so much money to be able to withstand it.”

“Well,” Lukas shrugged. “You'll figure it out.”

And here he is, all these years later, looking very much as though he has done just that. Because Childs, along with his son Alex and various partners under the CSLR Racing banner, is enjoying the ride with a colt so brilliant that he may yet overhaul the Triple Crown protagonists and reach the apex of the crop.

Crude Velocity (Beau Liam) heads to the GI Woody Stephens Stakes next weekend as a result of trainer Bob Baffert's preference not to push this raw but explosive talent too far, too soon. But there had certainly been talk, after he won the GII Pat Day Mile, of fast-tracking him into the GI Preakness.

“Oh, it just killed me not to run!” admits Childs with a chuckle. “But I respected Bob's decision. When we went to the Pat Day Mile, that actually was our goal. But afterwards he just kind of felt like, 'You know what? This horse is such a freak and has so much talent. I don't want to risk ruining him.' He felt like it came too soon, just wasn't the right way to go about it.”

Of course, Childs knew Baffert from their Quarter Horse days, as well; while it was Lukas who introduced him to Jimmy Gladwell, who has assisted Childs and his partners in their investments at the sales. Between them, they have been doing some pretty remarkable things. In 2025 alone, Iron Orchard (Authentic) was saddled by Danny Gargan to win the GI Frizette Stakes before being cashed out at Fasig-Tipton in November for $2.5 million to KatieRich Farms; GI Malibu Stakes runner-up Midland Money was sold to Dubai; while Pilot Commander (Justify), Silent Law (Tiz the Law) and Cash Call (McKinzie) all won graded stakes.

Pretty astonishing returns, from a stable aggregate of just 43 starts across the year. And these guys have only been operating since 2022, when Childs had his imagination captured by a Gulfstream maiden winner named Awesome Strong (Awesome Slew), when entered for a Fasig-Tipton Digital Sale.

“I watched his video 10 times and couldn't get over what I was seeing,” Childs recalls. “So I said, 'We need to put a little group together and buy this horse.' So we jumped in and gave $500,000 for him. And fortunately he was what I thought.”

Awesome Strong promptly swept the male division of the Florida Sires Series, giving his owners a taste for more. Childs himself had dipped his toe into Thoroughbreds, in his youth, but only to learn enough that he would only return once he had deeper resources-which he had meanwhile realized by some fortunate investments in land. Extra partners were largely recruited among Alex's friends.

“For the most part they're oil people, some here in Fort Worth, but mainly out of Midland, Texas,” Childs explains. “We said, 'Here's a great way that we could all have some fun, and you can write some money off [against tax].' That's how it all started, but of course now they're all hooked. We've been really fortunate, really blessed: we've had a lot of success, trying to be careful in what we bought. I will say that Crude Velocity, in my opinion, was the first real gamble we took.”

Certainly this horse has proved a luminous advertisement for his sire, as a graduate of his debut crop conceived at $6,000. Even that was three times the cost of his dam, who was picked up for just $2,000, and Crude Velocity himself changed hands for just $3,000 six months before blasting :20 1/5 for consignor Omar Ramirez. Even though that equaled the OBS breeze record, Childs was able to land him for $250,000.

“I took into consideration a problem he'd had as a baby, in one of his ankles,” he explains. “It appeared to be pretty much calcified over. Jimmy Gladwell and check against each together, buying horses-I say, 'What do you think?' and he says, 'What do you think?!'-and we just agreed that he had so much talent, he was worth taking a gamble on.”

Crude Velocity found all kinds of trouble on debut, in a Santa Anita sprint maiden in March, but got himself out of it in startling fashion.

“We knew he was fast, working, but didn't really know the determination he had until that first race,” Childs recalls. “In no how was he supposed to win that race, he had problems all the way through. So to come back and show that burst of speed at the end, well, Bob knew then he had something special.

“Before the second race, I called him and said, 'Hey, we're running against older stakes horses. Are you sure this is the right thing to do? You don't think this is too tough?' He said, 'I don't think it makes any difference. I think he's got enough talent and speed that he'll handle it.' And sure enough, he did. I was blown away, the way he outran those nice horses.”

Crude Velocity was still a rough diamond, even so, when squaring up to another horse with a big reputation at Churchill: but he blew Englishman (Maxfield) away, too.

Last week, matching his name, he warmed up for his Grade I debut with a 58.80 bullet over the same circuit. He will need to harness that speed for the drop back in distance at Saratoga, but Baffert is giving Childs and his partners every encouragement that Crude Velocity will stretch out effectively later in the campaign. While they are naturally taking things a step at a time, the provisional plan is to try him over a longer distance in the GI Haskell Stakes, and so get a handle on his eligibility for the ultimate step in the GI Breeders' Cup Classic.

Naturally a few inquiries have been fielded, but as yet no additional partners have been taken on board, either for the racetrack or a stud career. Childs acknowledges that their crew is not really set up for a breeding program, and of course they have already shown a willingness to take a profit to fund the next cycle. (They've been reloading purposefully at the 2-year-old sales.) But Childs feels that Crude Velocity still needs to prove his value before anyone should want to make the requisite commitment.

Whatever happens from here, this horse feels like a wonderful moment of fulfilment for a man with a lifelong passion.

“I've loved horses from six or seven years old,” Childs says. “I got my first horse then and was pretty much a cowboy up until my mid-20s. Thank God I grew out of that, but I've always had horses. I was in high school when I got my first Thoroughbred, a son of Vandy, and I ran him in a little track in Fort Worth called Ross Downs. I was working for my father, in the construction business, so I did it with my own money. I think I paid like 1,200 bucks for him, and he won a couple of races.

“After I got out of high school, I went to work for a securities company and was pretty successful. And I bought a ranch in East Texas and set up a training operation there. I had some success, but it's a different game. If you think it's hard to win a race with a Thoroughbred, get you a Quarter Horse and see how lucky you have to be.”

But that grounding has informed the judgement he brings to a Thoroughbred sale, much as was famously the case for Lukas and Baffert.

“Jimmy and I both look for the same aspects,” Childs explains. “We look at them pretty much the same way we do a Quarter Horse. If they've got all the things to make it work there, then we just feel like they're a darned good prospect to go forward as a Thoroughbred. Like Bob says, even if you go long distance, if you don't have any speed in the first part of the race, you're not going to catch them at the end. You've got to have both.”

Childs never lost his interest in Thoroughbreds-at one point, he even hoped that he could get a Texan partnership to save Hollywood Park-but was determined only to resume as and when he could do it properly.

“I had the itch,” he says. “But I just couldn't scratch it until the opportunity came along on Awesome Strong. I knew that in order to do it in a way that gave you a chance, you really had to have some firepower: to go buy these things, and then to stick with them until it happens. So I could never have done all this without our partners.

“Hopefully this horse will continue to be successful. A lot of things can happen in a horserace. But I think he's just kind of a freak, really. You can get in this game and go through a lifetime and never have one like this.”