How The Jockey Club Plans Large-Scale Racing Festivals with OnePlan

See how The Jockey Club plan large-scale racing Festivals more efficiently thanks to OnePlan’s event site planning software.
The ‘Epsom on Ice’ rink build in progress
Jockey Club x OnePlan
100,000

attendees

80

contractor companies

1,200+

objects

The Jockey Club is the UK’s largest horse racing organization, and owns 15 famous racecourses including Cheltenham, Newmarket, Aintree, home of the Grand National, and Epsom Derby, home of The Derby.

Epsom Downs Racecourse’s Events and Operations teams use OnePlan to plan multiple events throughout the year, and is now in planning mode for the Betfred Derby Festival 2025. 

The Derby is one of Britain’s great national sports events that sees over 100,000 people descend on Epsom Downs for the two-day event, with millions more watching on TV worldwide. We spoke to Heidi Truman, Abby Pettit and Hannah Carter to learn how they plan large-scale racing Festivals more efficiently thanks to OnePlan’s event site planning software.

From weeks of planning to just days

The Betfred Derby Festival 2025 is the pinnacle event staged at Epsom Downs in the year ahead. An event of this scale requires an accurate, easy-to-use visual planning platform that can ensure all teams are working from a single source of truth. “We used to plan events with images and screenshots that we’d put into Powerpoint, and add red and white lines over. We’d take aerial photo from the previous year, then plotted things over it. It was very basic,” says Abby, Event Manager at the Jockey Club. 

“We’d never know the actual scale of the site, and would just guess on measurements. It would take weeks, months even, to do it that way,” she continues. 

Jockey Club x OnePlan

The Epsom Derby is staged in June every year, and the planning starts in September for the following year’s event. Event Manager Hannah Carter says OnePlan has transformed how they now plan the event: “That old way would take weeks and weeks of planning to try and knit it all together, sending it back and forth, getting changes and having to start again.

“In OnePlan it’s so easy to make changes. Now we can produce a plan for the event in just days with OnePlan and make continual updates as the planning progresses,” she says. Compared to the previous weeks or months it could take in the past, that’s a significant time saving the Jockey Club gets from using OnePlan.

One live masterplan for 6,000 contractors

A key element in the planning process is the collaboration, both internal and external, to ensure that everyone is on the same page. The Events team shares its plan with other operational teams at the Jockey Club to get feedback, before sharing it with contractors to ensure the accuracy of the plan is adhered to for the event build.

The Jockey Club Event Plan 2

Heidi Truman, Project Manager at the Jockey Club, says it’s important for contractors to see the live plan to help plan the build: “Across the build, live event and de-rig, we have about 6,000 people from 80 contractors working on the Derby. Planning in OnePlan reduces our risks knowing that the contractors are all working to the same plan.”

“It’s one single live masterplan – we treat it as the gospel of truth,” she adds.

The Jockey club x OnePlan

Abby continues: “Sharing the view-only link of our plan is a great way to have contractors and suppliers access it. We can reach out to them, run through any changes from the previous year and ensure these are included in their detailed build schedules.”

Plotting zones, thousands of objects and getting sign-off

The Jockey Club’s plan for the Betfred Derby Festival 2025 is incredibly thorough, with over 1,200 objects placed in OnePlan. Going forward, they’re able to use the Folders functionality to categorise and manage these objects by the different zones at their venue. The events team differentiates each map zone with different colours, which then helps them plan specific areas within them, such as the Tattenham Enclosure, Lonsdale Enclosure and Derby Family Festival.  

Hannah says, “Zones are really useful for planning security, and health and safety, as we have over 100,000 people on site within the enclosures and out on The Hill. It helps the security teams understand where they’re based and the remit of each zone, and helps us define what we need in each area. Making sure St John’s Ambulance have a staff  welfare cabin, power and toilets, for example. The security, and health and safety, teams can then say if something doesn’t look right on the plan, and are able to sign it off.” 

Jockey Club x OnePlan

The team is able to easily ‘hide’ data on their plan depending on who they’re sharing the view-only link with. Abby explains: “There are essentially two different versions of the plan – the Build plan to instruct contractors where to go, deliver, drop and so on, and the Live event plan which is predominantly about pedestrian routes, dot plans, temporary structures, entrance and exits, branding and signage, and more. We try and overlay it all onto one plan.”

That includes a high number of CCTV cameras, toilets, barriers, generators, PA speakers and more, all accurately positioned on the plan. 

Optimising plans for future events

By planning multiple events in OnePlan, the team is able to optimise their plans from year to year. Hannah says, “It already makes us more efficient but we are still learning to maximise its full potential. We get feedback from our internal and external teams, which helps us consider what we need to change for the next time. For the Derby, we got feedback after the 2024 event, such as how busy the toilets were, and that’s going into our planning for the 2025 event.”

Jockey Club x OnePlan

Heidi adds, “It’s an important step after the event that we record the actuals and compare it to the plan, so we can optimise each time.”

Outside of race days, the Jockey Club uses OnePlan to plan other events, including the ‘Epsom on Ice’ Christmas ice rink. Heidi and the team can plan accurately, scaling the rink into a set perimeter and then working out what else can fit in the space for families to enjoy. 

“We can now plot the customer journey through the entire space, including where to place food and beverage vendors. If our suppliers have CAD files, we can upload them into OnePlan so everything is all together and accurate,” she says.

The ‘Epsom on Ice’ rink build in progress

The ‘Epsom on Ice’ rink build in progress

“And it helps with plotting signage around the car park. The rink is here for over a month and some nights we’ll also host Christmas parties, which means we need to activate different signage and share that with our traffic management teams. We can do all that in OnePlan, and plan for the different set-ups needed over the whole period.”

Across their events and with plans already in progress for the Betfred Derby Festival 2025, the Jockey Club team benefits from OnePlan providing a single source of truth for their events that they can ensure internal and external stakeholders are all aligned on. As Abby puts it: “OnePlan has become our bible for how we go forward every year.”

To explore how OnePlan can elevate your event planning and management, try it out now for free, or book a demo with our team and join over 50,000 events worldwide that use OnePlan.