Ugly duckling becomes central to ATC selling its golden goose

Unloved and unvarnished for 25 years, Warwick Farm, under the gun from the very start of Peter V’landys’ tenure in charge of Racing New South Wales, has remarkably emerged as the possible saviour of the Australian Turf Club’s plan to sell Rosehill.

The Liverpool City Council has been imploring the Australian Turf Club to spare a tin of paint for the fence at Warwick Farm racecourse for the better part of 10 years.

Former Council CEO Kiersten Fishburn told a parliamentary inquiry last year that she spent four years in the job, from 2016 to 2020, badgering the ATC to paint the external fence of the much-worn western Sydney racecourse.

“I’m sad to say it has not yet been completed,” she said. “I’ll keep on trying until I see that fence painted.”

It was a rare humorous exchange in an otherwise tense Rosehill parliamentary inquiry, but one which pointed to how neglected Warwick Farm had become in an era where New South Wales racing has never had so much money.

The course, located on an old floodplain next to the Georges River in south-western Sydney, seemed on death row when Racing NSW released its 2004 Strategic Plan.

The first plan under the guidance of then new CEO Peter V’landys proposed a new training centre be established at Horsley Park, with concerns raised over the long-term viability of Warwick Farm as a racing and training venue.

When surveyors were spotted measuring up Warwick Farm the following year, and the then Australian Jockey Club delayed a refurbishment of the track, it was taken as a sign that its days were numbered.

But through all the challenges thoroughbred racing has endured, including equine influenza, Covid-19 and a hotly contested merger between the AJC and the Sydney Turf Club, Warwick Farm has remained a fixture, albeit a neglected one, on the Sydney racing scene.

It last held a Group 1 race in 2016 and is now confined to largely midweek and public holiday duties.

In 2022, the ATC submitted a plan to build a retaining wall alongside a 1400-metre chute, allowing for bigger fields, as part of a broader refurbishment. Liverpool City Council held up approval as under its planning rules no construction could take place in an area which was defined as high risk of flooding, something which overlays about 66 per cent of the Warwick Farm site.

Before that dispute had even been resolved, there was a bigger plan hatched.

The ATC wanted Warwick Farm as the centrepiece of a plan to sell Rosehill.

The agenda of a meeting between the ATC’s Steve McMahon and the Cabinet Office in November 2023, a month before the Rosehill proposal was made public, said the ATC wanted to ‘relocate racing from Rosehill to Warwick Farm’ and ‘redevelop Warwick Farm as a state-of-the-art racing and training facility’.

ADVERTISEMENT

Learn more

Early draft of the announcement press release, revealed by parliamentary documents seen by The Straight, had Warwick Farm front and centre.

But that changed after a meeting between The Cabinet Office, V’landys and then Racing NSW chairman Russell Balding on November 17.     

“Racing NSW considers Warwick Farm might be expensive to convert to a full top-grade racecourse. Subject to deeper investigation there may not be enough room,” the minutes from that meeting read.

The fantastical concept of the Brickpit, a racecourse on a site at Homebush, was born soon after and no sooner had it been hailed as the centrepiece of any Rosehill deal, Warwick Farm was back in the reject pile.

V’landys articulated his concerns about Warwick Farm further at his appearance during the Rosehill inquiry last August.

“We would look at Warwick Farm but, as I mentioned, we want a track that is conducive to competitive racing, which gives the horse less injury and gives the punter the best opportunity to win – because the wider the turn, the longer the straight. It is conducive to competitive racing,” he said.

A month later, the new Racing NSW chair, Saranne Cooke, appeared to put the final dagger into any hopes that Warwick Farm could be the new Rosehill.

“It sounds like it’s going to be expensive,” she said.

Know More

At an earlier hearing, David Hall, the AJC chairman from 2005 until 2007, rubbished any possibility of an expanded footprint at Warwick Farm.

“I was the chairman of the AJC when we conducted the one-in-100-year flood event studies on Warwick Farm. There is no ability to expand Warwick Farm,” he said in July.

“It is bound by, on the one side, the river, and, on the other side, by the Hume Highway. It can never be made into a quality Group 1 track to carry a burden that would be placed upon it if Rosehill were sold.”

But as the Brickpit idea went bust, Warwick Farm was suddenly back in the spotlight.

ATC chairman Peter McGauran told The Straight in March of the plan to raze Warwick Farm and rebuild it, but it was only when we questioned the ATC as to the wording of the aborted first vote that it became clear that any new metro racetrack would only be secondary to a revamped Warwick Farm.   

In what has become a series of twists and turns, the ATC renewed its plans to transform the racecourse, and on Tuesday, will deliver a new briefing to members ahead of the Rosehill sale vote on May 27, promising a ‘Flemington of the west’.

Leaked to selected media ahead ahead of being put officially before members, the plans are to transform Warwick Farm, via an $800 million project, into a Group 1 quality racetrack.

It will feature a 2150-metre track with a 460-metre home straight and an inner grass track for secondary racing on the course. The plan is to relocate the grandstands to the Hume Highway side of the track and build 600 boxes of stabling capacity via 15 barns.

Added into the mix will be a ‘lifestyle club’ located close to the current William Inglis Hotel and Riverside Stables, which host all of Sydney’s major bloodstock sales.

Having not afforded Warwick Farm a lick of paint in 15 years, the better part of a $1 billion will be spent on making it one of Australia’s best racecourses.

Given the headaches the ATC endured from Liverpool City Council simply getting a chute built on the track, how it will get an entire new racecourse and appropriate development approved on largely high-risk flood zones will be interesting.

For its part, the ATC has said it consultants “concluded that the development would meet the requirements of the LCC Development Control Plan (DCP), provided that the necessary mitigants are implemented.”

That includes raising the grandstand by 6 metres, and increasing the track level to five per cent above flood levels.

What’s wrong with Warwick Farm? The inside running on Sydney’s ‘dinky-di’ racetrack

It’s doubtful that any piece of racing infrastructure is subject to as much widespread industry scrutiny as our major turf racetracks. Warwick Farm seems a special case.

The StraightWarwick Barr

The length of that construction process and relocation of trainers during a time when Rosehill will be winding down is another question to be answered, but the ATC insists it can execute this as part of $1.9 billion worth of overall spending which will completely reshape the look of Sydney racing.

But before the residents of Sydney’s south-west start celebrating the biggest investment into the area in many, many years, there are a host of other barriers to overcome. The most significant, and first one, is the approval of at least half of the ATC membership on May 27, while the second is the NSW government agreeing to pay $5 billion for the current Rosehill site.

Whether this grand concept is enough to convince both parties, only time will tell.