I think there is a major difference between running style and pace. One tells you how the horse typically likes to run and the other tells you how fast he has run in the past.
IMO, you start with style and then see if he's fast enough to achieve it.
But you absolutely have to look past races where the horse made the lead in a slow pace. No horse (other than an unrateable lunatic) is going to go at their maximum speed once it has made the lead just so handicappers can figure out who the fulcrum horse is.
You have to look back to see how fast the horse is when actually asked. And by this I don't mean his pace relative to his final time. I mean how fast is he. MS has sprint speed. Even if some of the those sprint paces were kind of slow they were still fast enough to run with any of these other horses at 10F.
The next step would be to estimate if he could run with these other horses at the likely pace and still get 10F. IMO, that was the question mark.
It was easy to see he was a front runner that was fast enough to be on the likely pace.
