The ground-breaking fan engagement game Fantasy Harness Racing is returning in an expanded national format featuring every state in early 2025.
Now in its third season since being launched as a New South Wales only product back in 2022, Fantasy Harness Racing will now see points accumulated across each Australian state when it returns in January.
Regular players will recognise most of the same features that underpin the game, but the addition of five new states, more than 10 race tracks and a fresh pool of drivers will bring an exciting new dimension for harness racing fans.
The first points of the new season will be counted on 30 January, 2025, with the opening round of the game highlighted by the time-honoured Hunter Cup race meeting at Melton.
Once again, Group 1 races will count for triple-points and under the national format, there will be an increase in bonus races on offer throughout the season, which concludes on the final night of Queensland’s Constellations carnival – when the 2025 Inter Dominion Grand Final will be held.
In between, players will chase the big points up for grabs at events such as The Nullarbor at Gloucester Park, the Strathalbyn Cup, the Group 1 Tasmania Cup and the lucrative Carnival of Miracles, featuring the Miracle Mile in New South Wales.
The new format has been backed by Harness Racing Australia.
“What really stood out to me when this idea of going national was first floated by the team at Harness Racing New South Wales was the opportunity for all of our states to work together on a really unified project with a common goal. So I’m rapt that when we pulled everyone together, everyone saw the value in that and made a unanimous decision to go forward with this national direction,” Harness Racing Australia Chief Executive Andrew Kelly said.
“There is a really collegiate approach to this and the way our calendar is scheduled every state will get a chance to have the spotlight on them when their feature races are on. It’s a very exciting development for harness racing and how we can engage with both new and existing fans.”
Fantasy Harness Racing was developed by Harness Racing New South Wales and won the Harness Racing Australia award for best innovation last year.
“The strategy was always to make Fantasy Harness Racing a national game and now seemed like the right time to take the next step and let it evolve on a grander scale,” HRNSW Marketing Manager Paul Cochrane.
“In two years we’ve managed to come up with a concept, get it built, iron out any technical issues and enhance the game through learned experience. Crucially it has built an audience that has given us user-feedback along the way and we’ve been able to tailor it to our racing product and make our drivers the focal point. The natural next step is to go bigger and go national!”
“Fantasy games are a different way to get people engaging with your sport, to get them investing their time and thoughts into the process of picking a team and creating conversations around the product. And those who have played it before have reported back to us that they are definitely paying more attention to racing at tracks they hadn’t previously considered, so there is proven benefit in this approach.”
“Fantasy games are also just a curation of data and turning that into points based on results. And that’s one thing that harness racing has plenty of – we are a data and results rich industry so it really is the perfect model for building a Fantasy sports game.”
There will be some key changes applied in Season 3 which are sure to enhance the user-experience:
- As previously, there will be four regions that players will pick their team from, but now they will be Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and WASAT – a team made up of drivers from Western Australia, South Australia and Tasmania.
- Players will select a squad of 22 drivers – 4 starting team drivers each for Queensland, NSW and Victoria and 6 for WASAT. They will also select a reserve for each region.
- The salary cap and variable pricing model will again apply. That means each driver has been given a price tag to start the season and their price will fluctuate up or down each round depending on how they scored.
- Each round will be made up of 12 race meetings – an increase on previous seasons.
- There will be three race meetings in each region per round. WASAT will be made up of the Gloucester Park meeting in Perth every Friday night, a South Australian race meeting and one in Tasmania.
- There will be 25 rounds in the season – running from 30 January to 19 July, 2025.
- Each round will start on a Thursday and conclude on either the Saturday or Sunday of that weekend (dependant on the Tasmanian racing schedule for that round). This means players will be selecting their teams after fields have been published.
- Players will need to select a captain each week who will have their score for that round doubled. That could be any driver across Australia who is in their selected team.
- Players will be given two trades each week to make changes to their squad, provided they are spending within the money available to them in their salary cap!
- Fantasy leagues will again be in play, meaning you can build a league and play against your friends and family in head to head battles each week to see who can get all the way through to a Grand Final for the ultimate bragging rights!
The scoring system will remain the same in Season 3. Drivers who win a race will be awarded 10 points. It is 5 points for second, 3 for third and 2 for fourth. All other drivers who participate in a race but don’t finish in the top 4 get one point.
At the end of each round the accumulated points in a player’s squad are their total score for the week. That score will determine how their price fluctuates heading into the following round.
There will once again be a lucrative prize pool up for grabs, including travel and hospitality packages to The TAB Eureka at Club Menangle and caps for the top 100 players at season’s end.
Registrations for Season 3 of Fantasy Harness Racing will commence in early December. You can pre-register to be alerted when the sign-up window opens by entering your details at www.fantasyharnessracing.com
