Newmarket unveils details of four-day QIPCO Guineas Festival

Newmarket Racecourses can now confirm details of what will be a season-opening four-day QIPCO Guineas Festival worth more than £1 million in prize money, featuring three QIPCO British Champions Series contests.

QIPCO will remain the meeting’s generous overarching sponsor, as well as for the QIPCO 2000 Guineas and QIPCO 1000 Guineas, the first Classics of the belated British season and first races in the Mile and Fillies & Mares divisions of British Champions Series, which will be staged on Saturday and Sunday respectively.

Friday’s card will also feature the Coronation Cup, moved from fellow Jockey Club Racecourses venue Epsom this year. The Group 1 contest will be sponsored for the first time by Sam Haggas’s Hurworth Bloodstock.

The race will be the first contest in the 2020 QIPCO British Champions Series, featuring as part of the Middle Distance category.

Joining QIPCO as a sponsor at the meeting will be Betfair, thanks to a Group-wide deal with The Jockey Club agreed prior to the outbreak of the pandemic.

Betfair will sponsor all other races on the Saturday and Sunday of the meeting, along with additional contributions to prize money made by the European Breeders Fund (EBF), for which Newmarket Racecourses is most grateful.

The first two days of the meeting, meanwhile, will be sponsored by Betway, who would ordinarily have supported The Spring Meeting at the Rowley Mile in late May.