Located at its current site since 1898, the Cheltenham Race Course is an internationally recognised racing venue.
Throughout the year it welcomes more than 700,000 visitors, with numbers reaching their peak during Festival Week, the highlight of which is the Betfred Cheltenham Gold Cup.
Since 2003, more than £20m has been invested in a new enclosure and additional race day facilities with The Centaur – a new conference and events centre – at the heart of this redevelopment. Part of this investment has seen Integral UK, one of the UK’s leading installers, upgrade the site’s fire detection equipment.
Tony Marsh, National Operations Manager (Integral Fire) at Integral UK, explains: “With the grandstand suffering from ongoing faults with its legacy detection equipment and Festival Week less than three months away, we were asked to refit the main grandstand, function rooms and boxes. The system we implemented used Advance four loop panels with Apollo XP95 equipment. We work with Apollo’s products on a regular basis and chose the XP95 range because it is a robust, cost effective and easy to install suite of fire detection products, ideally suited to this type of environment.”
The race course’s next major planned redevelopment includes the Weighing Room and Media Centre, requiring the detection system to be fully networked. As such, the installed panels have been future proofed to allow for this integration as the development continues.
As with any large venue it is important to minimise disruption from unwanted alarms on event days. Therefore, should any alarm be activated, it goes to alert before ringing. This enables the fire and security team at the Races to quickly ascertain if a full scale evacuation is needed.
