Hazel Park adds four days to race meet

Hazel Park Raceway will expand its 2017 meet by four days, which moves closing day to Sept. 18 and brings the total number of race dates for the season to 40.

The supplemental dates will deviate from the regular schedule, running Sundays and Mondays, Sept. 10-11 and Sept. 17-18. Sundays will feature an earlier 4:30 p.m. Eastern post time, while Monday cards will start at the normal 7:20 p.m. Hazel Park normally hosts night cards on Fridays and Saturdays.

“We actually had a big turnout when we had the races on Sunday last year,” said George Kutlenios, president of the Michigan Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Association. “It was kind of a different crowd with more families.”

The track was initially scheduled to conclude its 36-day meet with the cornerstone Michigan Sire Stakes card on Saturday, Sept. 2. The request for additional dates was approved by the Michigan Gaming Control Board on Friday.

“We were always going to put in for 40 days last year, but we put it at 36 because we were a little afraid of what happened two years ago when we ran out of purse money, and the track [management] was nervous,” Kutlenios said. “We said we’d apply for 36, and if we had plenty of purse money, we could always add more days. We thought ADW was going to be up and running by now, but even without ADW, we had enough for 40 days going into the meet this year.”

The shift in schedule prevents overlap with nearby harness track Northville Downs, which begins its meet on Sept. 8 and is already slated to race Fridays and Saturdays.

Since the track refocused itself as a Thoroughbred venue in 2014, Hazel Park has never ended a live meet on the day it scheduled to do so at the beginning of the season.

The track added seven days of live racing to last year’s meet and ran an additional six days in 2014 to make up for Thoroughbred dates originally allotted to Northville Downs that were retracted. Hazel Park ended its meet a month prematurely in 2015 due to insufficient purse funds.