The start of summer heralds race-free Mondays and twilight metropolitan racing on Wednesdays in Victoria.
Sandown hosts the first of four months of twilight meetings next week.
The exceptions will be Boxing Day and the January 2 meeting which are run during the peak holiday period.
There will be 13 race-free Mondays with those meetings transferred on 12 occasions to a Wednesday timeslot to create a double-header.
There will be some Monday meetings on Christmas Eve, New Year’s Eve, the Australia Day public holiday on January 28 and Labour Day, March 11.
A successful trial was conducted over a three-month period last year with Racing Victoria’s Greg Carpenter saying the expanded program this season came as a result of that.
“The Wednesday twilights were particularly popular with an average turnover of $12.78 million per meeting, up from $10.85 million per meeting when held in the Wednesday afternoon timeslot the season prior,” Carpenter said.
“Our analysis showed that racing fans were able to better engage after work with the Wednesday twilight meeting and that the break from racing on a Monday was viewed as a positive by the industry and an innovation worth persisting with.”
Echuca and Sandown will stage the first of the double-header meetings on Wednesday.
