Brighton racecourse

🐎 Course: Brighton

🎫 Ticket & Value: £25 Premier Enclosure

👀 Track View: 3/5

🍔 Food: 4/5

🍺 Guinness: 4/5

⭕️ Parade Ring: 2/5

🏇 Runners and Riders: 1/5

🎉 Atmosphere: 4/5

⭐️ Overall Experience: 4/5

👍🏻 Best for: Atmosphere 🎉

Friday Afternoon of the Summer Festival

Located close to the heart of the city and overlooking the beautiful south coast, Brighton racecourse offers an affordable and enjoyable experience for friends and families. Staff were extremely welcoming as we entered the compact and unique racecourse, where the sun was shining beautifully over the south coast.

The ticket at £25 was good value initially, offering full access to the racecourse including the parade ring, weighing room and trackside bars. However, having walked around the racetrack, the only difference between the price and general admission was access to a slightly larger stand and some betting posts. Therefore, I’d say the extra ticket value probably wasn’t worth the £15 extra as the grandstand ticket still had access to the key areas mentioned above.

For track view the grandstand provided a great view of the track, watching the riders leave the stalls and wheel down the steep hill before climbing back up to the winning post. Having said that, when standing by the rail the view was limited and you were unable to see the riders starting from the stalls, even at the 5f start.

The food and Guinness at Brighton were some of the best we’d experienced trackside so far. The Guinness was poured to perfection and was crisp and cold throughout the day, despite being £7.20 a pint it is one of the best we’ve had to date. The food options were varied including burgers, a deli counter and a wonderful fish and chip bus serving traditional chippy meals. For £14 we had a battered sausage, fish and chips and it was one of the best fish and chips we’d ever had…not just trackside. Great crispy well fried batter and perfectly cooked white flaky fish inside.

Unfortunately, with the course being tight and slightly outdated the parade ring wasn’t fantastic with poor views of the horses and very small in size. Although you had access to the jockeys coming out of the weighing room, with the parade ring being small we imagine this leads to smaller field sizes in general.

This leads to the runners and riders on the card, where for a summer festival you’d expect a competitive and higher quality of jockeys and horses at the track. However, this was not the case as most races were with smaller fields and plenty of apprentice jockeys on the card. Despite David Probert and Willie Carson being there, there were no other big jockey bookings alongside class 4, 5 and 6 racing.

Amazingly, despite the lack of quality racing on the card, the atmosphere in and around the racecourse was excellent! The crowd were lively in the betting ring and standside, with lots of cheering and supporting the runners as they finished past the winning post. It was clear the locals really enjoyed this day in the calendar, and it was a shame they weren’t treated to a higher quality of racing to match their enthusiasm.

Overall, we highly recommend visiting the unique racecourse for the summer festival as it provides good racing for a reasonable price, offers very good food and drink options and has a brilliant atmosphere from the local racegoers.

Stunning View From The Grandstand at Brighton