The ten virtual venues

All ten venues on this page are invented. So is every venue in commercial virtual racing: Portman Park, Sprintvalley and Steepledowns are brands of the 49's virtual product, which Inspired Entertainment says has been present in United Kingdom betting shops since 2001 (company press release, 29 November 2017, read 18 October 2026), and Brushwood and Millersfield run the dogs on the same feed. Not one of the five is a place. The industry has never pretended otherwise — it simply does not say so on the card.

What this circuit does differently is print the geometry. Each card below carries the code, the surface and the shape, and each venue page carries the rest: circumference, home straight, chute, rail, the distances the engine is programmed over, the field sizes it fills and the cadence it runs at. Mallee Park is 1800 m around with a 400 m straight, and its day cadence is every 3 min, 08:00–18:00 — 200 races. Read as a set, the ten lines are a description of what the engine is modelling. For the real product the same cadence is reported three ways — three minutes, three to five minutes and nine minutes (archived horseracingbuzz.net results index and portmanparkresults.com, read 18 October 2026) — so where the sources disagree, the disagreement is recorded rather than resolved.

Geometry changes what the screen shows, not what the draw does: a barrier holds no numbers in the weighting table, and nothing here is watered, rolled or rained on, so a form line from any of the ten carries no track rating at all. The names sit in the register the real product uses — place-like, plain, unglamorous — and none of them duplicates an Australian racecourse, paceway or greyhound track. Each venue page also carries one sentence on what its proportions were modelled on, which is as far as the resemblance goes. How a virtual race is decided sets out the arithmetic the geometry does not touch.