Taunton
National Hunt

Taunton is right-handed, an elongated oval of about 1 mile 2 furlongs — essentially two long straights joined by two sharp, tight bends. The track is largely flat, but with a downhill run into the 3-furlong home straight, passing the third-last fence and second-last hurdle, before a steady climb to the finish. The run-in is very short, around 150 yards — one of the shortest in Britain. The chase course carries 7 fences a circuit (4 in the back straight, including 2 open ditches, and 3 plain fences in the home straight) — individually rated small and straightforward, but the course has historically had a comparatively high faller and unseat rate, attributed to the sharpness of the track and the standard of horse it typically attracts rather than fence design. The third-last fence and second-last hurdle, both on the downhill section, are flagged as the spots where novices are most likely to come unstuck. The hurdle course has 5 flights a circuit, two of them in the home straight. The course was physically enlarged in the 1960s using spoil earth from the nearby M5 motorway’s construction, extending the back straight and easing the bends.

Taunton Racecourse Company was founded in July 1927, and the course staged its first meeting that September on land at Orchard Portman granted by Viscount Portman. Genuinely distinctive: Taunton was the last completely new racecourse built in Britain, holding that status for 81 years until Great Leighs opened in 2008. It has been run independently by the same company since 1927 — no evidence anywhere links it to Jockey Club Racecourses or Arena Racing Company. Bob Young retired in 2025 after 26 years as CEO and Clerk of the Course, succeeded by Patrick Davis, who previously spent eight years running Plumpton Racecourse. The course has no major on-course scandal or safety incident on record, though it has been abandoned at various points for frost, waterlogging, and even drought (April 2022) despite a general reputation for good winter drainage.

Taunton doesn’t host a permanent Graded race, but it did stage a genuine one-off: on 14 December 2017, the Grade 2 Peterborough Chase was relocated here after snow forced its usual venue, Huntingdon, to abandon — won by Top Notch, on what Racing Post called the biggest and most valuable raceday ever staged at the course. Taunton’s real strength is as a launchpad: Oslot’s racecourse debut here in 2006 preceded a Galway Plate win two years later, and Paul Nicholls has sent several future Grade 1 winners — Al Ferof, Irving, Saphir Du Rheu — to race here early in their careers.

Taunton has one of the strongest front-running biases of any British course — only Hexham is rated as showing a greater one. In 2-mile handicaps specifically, front-runners have won 33.3% of the time, an Impact Value of 2.42 that rises to 3.03 once adjusted for the race’s overall pace — meaning an early leader here has been roughly three times more likely to win than a randomly selected runner. The mechanism is straightforward: a sharp, right-handed track with a very short run-in gives hold-up horses little chance to deliver a challenge. The exact source and sample window behind these headline figures couldn’t be independently re-verified in full, so treat the direction as extremely well-established and the precise numbers as credible rather than double-confirmed.