Flying Horses, Flatlining Fun: Racing's £3.62m Marketing Gamble Tries to Sell a Trip to B&Q as Disneyland

Cartmel’s Got Picnics and Charm. You’ve Got Pigeons Mating on a Grandstand.

Let’s get one thing straight: this £3.62 million marketing campaign, The Going Is Good, is not a bad idea. It’s just a tragically misdirected one — like teaching a labrador to play chess instead of just letting it chase a ball. Great British Racing has unleashed a dreamy montage of flying horses, screaming women (in the good way), and slow-mo laughter that makes it all look like a Richard Curtis film about a day at the races.

But here’s the galloping great irony: most racecourses couldn’t produce that experience if you gave them Spielberg, a billion pounds, and a hundred screaming Shetlands on stilts.

Because if you turn up at the average British racecourse on a Saturday expecting fun, action, music, or anything to fill the glacial gaps between races, you’ll be treated instead to a field of depressed men holding laminated betslips and trying to work out how they’re still sober after four Guinnesses. That’s if you're lucky. The unlucky ones are trying to decode the Racing Post while using a bin lid as an umbrella.

“Ours Had Flying Horses.” Yes, and Ours Had a Man in Crocs Shouting at a Bin.

The campaign leans heavily on “four million memories made every year.” Which is fair. It’s just that the memories are usually of logistical failure, budget regret, and watching someone’s auntie fall backwards off a folding chair during the 2:35. One mock-up shows children on teacup rides and horses jumping a fence at Cheltenham. Lovely. Except most tracks couldn’t organise a tombola, let alone a functioning fairground.

It’s the classic British leisure paradox: you’re sold Glyndebourne and handed a half-shut café with no ketchup.

There are exceptions, of course. York — beautiful, efficient, friendly — is the Ascot for people who don’t enjoy being sneered at by oligarchs in boaters. They’ve got proper food, proper beer, real staff who smile without looking traumatised, and — here’s the big one — actual entertainment between races. York knows that a punter’s patience has limits, especially when their 16/1 dead cert just finished sixth behind a horse called Timmy’s Ladle.

Then there’s Cartmel, a course that should, by all logic, be a complete logistical disaster — it’s a field in Cumbria with a church in the middle and a car park that doubles as a sheep field. And yet! Somehow, they’ve cracked it. Why? Picnics. Family day out. Booze in a basket. Dogs on leads. Children rolling down hills while their parents slowly roast in camping chairs. It’s actual charm — and the punters bring half the fun themselves.

Meanwhile, at other courses — naming no names, but you know who you are — you're lucky if the only family activity is watching a toddler lick a betting slip while someone shouts at a pigeon.

Why Can’t the Below-Average Learn from the Excellent?

This is the great British affliction: institutional mediocrity defended as “tradition.” Instead of learning from York — whose staff seem to know how to run a day out and which end of the horse is which — the middling tracks double down on damp chips, flat lager, and entertainment so sparse it makes a Mormon funeral look like Ibiza Rocks.

Why doesn’t somewhere like Leicester or Redcar — solid, respectable, underachieving — just copy Cartmel’s family-day-out approach and York’s inter-race jazz band? No shame in imitation, lads. McDonald’s doesn’t reinvent the wheel every week, and they’ve sold 300 billion Big Macs.

But no. Instead, we get these defensive little fiefdoms clinging to the idea that their grim five-race card on a Tuesday in March is a sacred cultural rite, and that any suggestion of music, fun, or novelty would cheapen the experience. Mate, the only thing cheaper is the sandwich you’ve been microwaving since 2008.

Starmer Would Be Proud: The Vibe Is Good, the Outcome Unclear

The whole campaign smacks of Sir Keir Starmer’s strategic genius: Look the part, say something vaguely optimistic, and hope nobody asks what the plan actually is. It’s all very modern Britain — well-lit, tonally gentle, and built entirely on the hope that nobody kicks the tyres too hard.

“Marketing is about feelings,” the consultants will tell you. And they’re not wrong. The campaign feels great — right up until you actually go racing and realise that, for £45 a ticket, the only feeling you’re getting is one of vague loneliness between races, as the tannoy man mumbles something about “delays in the paddock.”

If You Want Four Million Memories, Try Providing Four Million Moments

British racing has confused event with interval. The races are the point, yes — but there are maybe six of them, they last under two minutes each, and they’re spaced so far apart you could fit a small Wagner opera between them.

So, for roughly 90% of the afternoon, your punter is wandering around, looking for somewhere to sit that doesn’t require an oxygen tank, trying not to mortgage their kidneys for a pint, and wondering why they weren’t just at the pub watching it on telly.

Marketing can’t solve that. No advert in the world can convince someone that standing in a drizzle-slicked field for seven hours is “the best day out of the summer” unless you give them something to do between the actual reason they came.

In Conclusion: Picnics, Not Flying Horses

So here’s my pitch to Great British Racing: less CGI, more picnics. Less dreamscape, more Cartmel’s “bring your own magic.” Less “Ours had flying horses,” more “Ours had a dog with a bow tie, a dad asleep on a blanket, and a brass band that knew Uptown Funk.”

Because until every course realises that the entertainment between the races matters more than the horses themselves for casual punters, you’re just selling a very expensive, oddly dressed waiting room.

And the going? Well, it might be good in the ads. But on the ground, for far too many, it’s patchy, slow... and in desperate need of a picnic, a band, and a reason to hang about.