Ascot Racecourse

Introduction

It was Queen Anne who first saw the potential for a racecourse at Ascot, which was known as East Cote. While she was out riding in 1711, she came upon an area of open heath, not far from Windsor Castle, that looked an ideal place for “horses to gallop at full stretch”.

Being run by a not-for-profit company on behalf of the Crown puts Ascot Racecourse in a unique position that it can fund a complete re-build of the whole site rather than the incremental improvements at other courses.

The course hosts relatively small meetings of 10,000 people within the permanent buildings during the winter jumps season. But the highlight of the year is Royal Ascot where crowds of up to 80,000 attend on each of the 5 days of the meeting. Huge temporary buildings housing many thousands of people are erected for the event, and all the facilities have to be able to stretch to be able to accommodate this extra load.

Involvement

As Project Director of a team of 11 specialists which was charged with the responsibility for the Acoustics, Sound System (PAVA) Vision System, IT network and systems, and the associated cabling, Steve Jones led the process of design, specification, competitive tender, approvals and witness testing.

Within the design were some notable technological highlights, such as the use of IPTV for the distribution of the 30+ channels required for the punters, the racing integrity, the betting companies. The TVs within permanent buildings were plugged directly into set top boxes connected to the IT Network. For the temporary buildings, a series of set top boxes had the outputs daisy chained in order to have up to 9 channels distributed over traditional RF cabling for TVs which had been rented in.

The sound system employed Digital Signal Processors and audio carried digitally over fibre optic cable to distribute the sound over many kilometres around the site. In line with Steve’s past designs for famous stadia, the emergency microphone for event control was routed using commands made on a touchscreen. Duplicate facilities were also deployed in the diverse location of the security office.

WLAN or WiFi was becoming the norm for betting, catering operations, and many other operators in the peripatetic world of horse racing, but it was soon realised that a full integration of both Wireless and cabled networks was the only way in which business critical operations could take place with guaranteed quality as well as security of the financial transactions. Steve and his team managed to persuade the extremely hesitant stakeholders that this was the only way forward and hence broke the mould of self protectionism in favour of trusted VLANs and VPNs.

Another area of operational angst is that of radio communications generally. Steve set up a communications policy for Ascot whereby all stakeholder who wished to use a transmission device had to obtain a licence from Ascot to do so. This meant that potential conflicts of interest were avoided and the spectrum could be assigned for business critical purposes. Whilst this was in addition to the regulatory bodies, it did avoid the conflicts which had nevertheless been occurring in the past.

This project was one where the broad knowledge in depth across many forms of electronic systems was invaluable.