February 25, 2025

The United Kingdom hosts one of the most varied racing calendars in the world. Flat racing runs from March to November on turf and all-weather surfaces. National Hunt (jump) racing — hurdles and steeplechases — runs year-round, peaking in the winter months. Understanding how course type and distance are structured in the data is the starting point for any UK racing analysis project.Course Surfaces in the HRDB UK DatasetOur UK dataset covers racing across all three main surface types:Turf — The traditional surface for British flat racing. Going codes range from Firm through Good to Heavy, with the scale directly impacting pace and sectional time benchmarks.All-Weather (Polytrack / Tapeta / Fibresand) — Year-round synthetic surfaces at courses including Wolverhampton, Kempton, Chelmsford and Lingfield. Surface type is encoded per-race in our schema.Jump surfaces — National Hunt races over hurdles and fences, primarily turf.Distance ClassificationUK distances are measured in furlongs and miles. Our schema stores the canonical distance string (e.g. “5f”, “1m2f”, “3m½f”) alongside a normalised decimal in furlongs for consistent numeric querying. This allows straightforward grouping and comparison without string parsing in your application layer.What HRDB CoversOur UK dataset currently covers results from 2011 onwards, with sectional time data available from 2017 at participating courses. Each race record includes the full entry list with weights, draw, headgear and jockey assignment — plus the result with finishing positions, winning time and margin. Historical archives are available in bulk CSV/SQL format or via our REST API for live data.View the UK dataset for full schema documentation and coverage details.

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UK Racing Data: Course Types, Distance Classifications and What HRDB Covers

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