I believe I should make my new year resolution to write my blog more regularly!

For this blog I will reflect briefly on my personal high and lows at Plumpton in 2011. As a glass half full girl, there are more highs than lows (thankfully).

Highs

1. Getting all 16 racemeetings on, with no abandonments.  A huge debt of gratitude to our amazing groundstaff for this, as it has not been easy, especially with the exceptionally dry spring and autumn requirying a record amount of watering.

2.  Winning a special Judges award at the Racecourse Association’s Showcase awards. These awards were fiercely competitive, so to get a prize for Plumpton from your peers was very satisfying.

3. Improving our overall Visit England visitor experience mark by nearly 10%, following the hard work of all the team here.

4. We had our first Irish trained winner at Plumpton – Shernaz trained by Jim Dreaper on 14th November.

5. Being awarded the Investors in People accredition for the first time.

6. So many of our raceday staff (over 40 and still counting) being awarded  an NVQ level 2 (and Steve Tomlin a level 3). This did involve hard work, and their precious time outside of racedays.

7.  Seeing so many horses who have ran at Plumpton go onto graded race success. Bensalem, Divers and Zemsky were successful at the Cheltenham Festival having run at Plumpton as novices.

8. What a fantastic year for racing in general, with Kauto Star’s King George the cherry following on from Big Bucks dominance, one of the best Cheltenham Gold Cups in my lifetime, and Frankel’s 2000 Guineas. Great to also see Mattie Batchelor win the Hennessey Gold Cup, and Charlie Poste the Welsh National.

Lows

1.  Those close to Plumpton who have passed away in 2011, especially Jim Emons, Chris Copsey and Mr Hunnisett.

2. The very late confirmation of fixtures for 2012 has caused us a lot of aggravation, and a delay in us being able to promote our early racedays.

3. Losing £350,000 of industry funding from the levy means we are running races for less prizemoney than has been the norm at Plumpton in recent years, and we have had to delay customer facility improvements.

4. Network Rail engineering works on key racedays – our sincere apologies to customers travelling to Plumpton by train. We do tell them of our racedays, yet they have still scheduled works.

It has been a very busy summer since we last raced. 4 months may seem lots of time to achieve all we want to in the close season however with events going on most weekends, and a long list of improvements and tasks to action, we are certainly not sitting around twiddling our thumbs!

We hope that you will benefit from some of these changes when we start racing again on 18th September – we reviewed the feedback from the customer suggestions pages in the racecard last season to ensure we put in place an action plan to tackle the most pressing and reoccurring issues. 

We have invested in mobile credit card machines for a number of entrances, so we can provide those people (like me!) who don’t carry much cash to pay for admission with credit and debit card.

Ray our Handyman has been busy with the paint brush as ever over the summer period, and the Centre Course toilets have been refurbished with new flooring.  We have also resurfaced behind the stands – this has enabled us to create a new outdoor seating area outside the Sussex Stand near to the concessionary catering units following feedback from customers about general lack of seating here. 

One big summer project for us has been the introduction of a new ticket printing system.  This enables us to print tickets in our office, and also directly when a customer makes a booking online. This will help us by speeding up our dispatch of tickets and giving us flexibility to ensure we can always provide enough tickets for each gate. We hope you like the design - any feedback is most welcome.

We are all genuinely excited to be starting racing again,  and welcoming back many familiar faces.

Firstly many apologies that I haven’t blogged in ages. The last few months have gone by in a blur, no doubt excerbated by the delays in the fixture list process for 2011 which held up the publication of the 2011 dates until September and confirmation of funding until late November.  This had all sorts of knock on effects, and compressed many of my deadlines, and I haven’t really paused for breath in the meantime.

In the meantime we have had another winter of snow and heavy rainfall.  We have been relatively fortunate to avoid the worst of the weather when racing, and have lost only one meeting to date this season when we had the first dump of snow in early December.   

There have been lots of highlights already, and we still have 7 meetings to go including Monday, our first Albion in the Community Raceday.  We are expecting a number of current players and Seagull legends along to support the day – if you enjoy racing and are an Albion fan, it doesn’t get much better. The Moore’s have kindly donated Sebastiano for the day, as a star prize in a raffle to raise money for the charity, and there will be some very tempting prizes to win on a tombola stall on the day.

As a jump racing fan, this time of year is always very exciting as we start to see some of last year’s stars re-emerge such as Monet’s Garden who is a personal favourite, and last season’s top novices start on new careers such as Cue Card over hurdles on Sunday.  A couple of weeks back I visited Richard Rowe’s yard for his open day, and was delighted to see Andy Stewart has Tatenen and Watergate in training at Richard’s yard for the new season. We wish him, and all our local trainers, all the best for the coming months. We always watch the entries coming in with anticipation, hoping to see some promising types running here.

Nick Gifford is a trainer to follow at our October meeting, and he duly had another winner at the last meeting in the bumper with Bad Sir Brian who is owned in partnership by Betfair founder Andrew Black.  It was also good to see new trainer Alison Batchelor, based in Petworth, have a winner and second.      

We are all on tenterhooks this week as we wait to see what happens with the levy – Sunday is deadline day by which a settlement between racing and betting needs to be made or it will be referred to the Secretary of State for determination. At the moment we are unable to put together our programme of races from our Sunday 2nd January racemeeting onwards as we do not know what our prizemoney funding will be.   Hopefully we will get some clarity in the next 2 weeks. Please help support Plumpton’s and the racing industry’s case for a fairer levy return by signing the Charter at  http://www.racingunited.co.uk/.

As I’m writing this the sun is shining, and we all have our fingers crossed that the Indian summer continues until next Monday for the annual Moorcroft Racehorse Welfare Centre raceday.

Moorcroft is a charity that is very close to the hearts of everyone working at Plumpton, and it’s fundraising raceday is in its eleventh year here. The team, especially Lisa,  get very involved in preparing for the day as the centre is run on a skeleton office staff to keep overheads down so we help out with running and administering the day. There is a dedicated Raceday Committee who work tirelessly at getting auction items, selling tickets to the lunch and finding sponsors, who have done a great job this year.  All races are sponsored, and the lunch is a sell out.

Andy Stewart is a very generous supporter of both Moorcroft and Plumpton, and his charitable foundation is sponsoring the Shetland Pony race that takes place at 1.40pm. I recommend going to see the Shetland in the paddock beforehand, and watching the race itself as the 10 Shetlands thunder up the home straight under the colours of many leading owners.  Last year’s finish was one of the most exciting of the season!

Since the last racemeeting we have had confirmation of our fixture dates for next year, but are still awaiting details of levy funding.    More on these topics next time!

The summer has been and gone again and we are now in the very final preparations for the first racemeeting of the season. Marquees are going up, windows being washed, and the finishing touches and checks being made.

The course is looking a picture – a lush green carpet. The recent rain has done it the world of good, and Mark and his team have been busy over the summer with all the maintenance jobs necessary to get us back into shape after a long and hard winter last year.  Ray, our very handyman, has been permenently attached to the paint brush. We have also undertaken drainage works which should hopefully improve our chances of racing if we have a wet winter.

We had two new members of staff join us over the summer. Ross Craig has replaced Alan Greening as Groundsman, and may be familiar to many of you as he has been working on a casual basis on racedays for the last three years. We also have part time office help from Linda Lawrence, who has also helped us on racedays before by ferrying mascots around and the other random things you get involved with through working here.

We are all very much looking forward to racing here again and the season ahead, starting with Ladies Day on Sunday.

Countryside Day is one of my favourite of the year as I look forward to watching how much the Beagles and Hounds enjoy their romp along the racecourse.  My own dog Holly would love to take part – those of you who have visited the racecourse office outside of racedays will no doubt have been welcomed by Holly who comes to the office every day, and considers herself very much part of the team here. Shame she cannot answer the phone.

Though we are delighted the sun is finally shining and it truly feels as though Spring is here, we have also had to start watering from Wednesday. All is looking good for a dry and sunny day on Monday – the wet weather at Easter seems a long time ago!

The Grand National was particularly enjoyable this year, and we were all absolutely delighted for A P.  We were all cheering him home from 4 out, despite not having a penny on.  We are very lucky as a racecourse to enjoy the support of A P, Jonjo and J P McManus, and it was great to see A P get the wider recognition he so richly deserves.

The two day Easter Festival are Plumpton’s busiest racemeetings of the year.  In the lead up the office is  especially busy – with a team of 4 we do try to answer all phone calls quickly, and offer our usual personal and friendly standards of service. The website has been a big help this year as many people have chosen to book tickets online.

We are trying a couple of new initiatives this Easter. The first is an on site creche and Easter activity centre - with Easter Egg Trail, Arts and Craft activities, sporting games and Munchie the Rabbit.

We are also trying a new race on the Sunday, a £10,000 2 mile Handicap Hurdle and are happy with the quality and number of entries at this stage.  We are very grateful for the support of our local trainers such as Gary Moore, Sheena West and Nick Gifford, as well as those who have entered runners from further afield such as David Pipe, Philip Hobbs and Charlie Mann. We would like to further improve the profile of this race and meeting in future years – it is always a difficult time to stage more valuable races as Easter is usually very close to either Cheltenham, Aintree, or both. 

We also received delivery of Plumpton’s new horse mascot last week which we have put in training for the Children’s Trust Mascot Champion Hurdle on May 9th. Racegoers at Easter will get the chance to name the mascot and win a VIP day at the races- so get your thinking caps on!

We held our Cheltenham Festival preview dinner on Friday evening, sponsored by the tote. It was a very enjoyable night, with lots of great nuggets of info from Mark Winstanley, Andy Stewart, Nick Gifford and George Primarolo. There doesn’t appear to be much confidence behind Denman, and George was taking a view against both Master Minded and Dunguib at the current prices. Some of the darker horses given a positive mention were Loosen My Load and Barwell Boy.

The evening was  extended by a few drinks afterwards at the The Engineer pub in Brighton. They have won the Racing Pub of the Year prize, and it is very clear to see why. It’s a shrine to racing, with football relegated to it’s proper place. It’s definitely a great place to watch racing during the Festivals or on a Saturday afternoon.      

This is always a nervous week for our insurers, whose support along with SIS’s sponsorship enables us to offer the £60,000 Cheltenham Festival Bonus.  As it currently stands Bensalem is the shortest price of the possible contenders, for Tuesday’s RSA Chase. Mobaasher is entered in Wednesday’s National Hunt Chase, and Nomecheki has multiple entries with the Grand Annual on Friday currently favoured.   

I am looking forward to our racemeeting tomorrow which looks like being a gorgeous day, and then being at Cheltenham on Thursday and Friday, and hoping to cheer Kauto Star home. My first visit to the Festival was for Dawn Run’s Gold Cup, and have tried to make it for at least one day every year ever since. There were a couple of years where I haven’t gone, but as with most of us Jump fans, it is a week that I look forward to more than any other all year.