Why would a race meet that's run in Del Mar since the 1930s suddenly matter to the week you're already hosting family for Thanksgiving?
Because this year, the calendar did something it hasn't done in recent memory. The track's fall meet, officially the 13th Bing Crosby Season, opens Friday, November 6 and closes Sunday, November 29, 2026. That's a full week later than last year's opening day, and it's thirteen days of racing instead of sixteen. The shift sounds small until you notice where those thirteen days land. The meet's two biggest cards, the ones carrying the season's marquee stakes races, fall on the Saturday and Sunday immediately after Thanksgiving. If you live in Del Mar, Solana Beach, or anywhere along the 5 corridor that empties into the fairgrounds, this is the year the track's closing weekend and your holiday houseguests are competing for the same three days.
A Smaller Meet, On Purpose
Last fall, Del Mar hosted the Breeders' Cup World Championships for the second year running, a two-day event carrying more than $34 million in purses across 14 Grade 1 races. That meet ran 16 days, opened October 30, and closed out November with more than $3 million in the track's own stakes purses on top of the Breeders' Cup money. It was, by design, a global event that happened to be staged on a stretch of California coastline most of us drive past on the way to Trader Joe's.
This year is a different animal. There's no Breeders' Cup on the schedule. The meet runs 13 days across four weekends plus a bonus Thanksgiving Thursday card, and the stakes schedule totals $2.1 million in purses across 15 races. It's a leaner, more local version of the fall season, built around a holiday rather than around a global spectacle grafted onto one.
That contraction is worth sitting with for a second. A shorter meet that starts later isn't just a scheduling quirk. It means the entire season is now backloaded into the three weeks that already carry the heaviest travel and family obligations of the year. Where last year's meet had weeks to spread its energy across October and November, this year's compresses almost all of it into the run-up to and the days immediately following Thanksgiving.
What's Actually Racing
Opening day, Friday, November 6, gets things moving with the $100,000 Let It Ride Stakes, a one-mile turf race for three-year-olds. It's the kind of card that draws a steady local crowd without needing much explanation.
The next two weeks fill in with a run of $100,000 stakes races that reward a closer look if you're the kind of resident who likes knowing what's happening at the track before a friend mentions it over coffee at the farmers market:
- The Chosen Vron Stakes, a seven-furlong Cal-bred race for three-year-olds and up
- The Betty Grable Stakes, a seven-furlong race for fillies and mares
- The Desi Arnaz Stakes, a seven-furlong race spotlighting two-year-old fillies
Then the season saves its weight for the very end. Saturday, November 28 carries a triple-header of graded stakes: the Grade 1 Hollywood Derby, a mile and an eighth on the turf for top three-year-olds with a $300,000 purse, alongside the Grade 2 Seabiscuit Stakes and the Grade 3 Jimmy Durante Stakes for juvenile fillies. Sunday, November 29, closing day, goes even bigger with four stakes races on one card: the Grade 1 Matriarch for fillies and mares over a mile of turf, the Grade 3 Cecil B. DeMille for top two-year-olds, the Grade 3 Bayakoa on the main dirt track, and the $100,000 Stormy Liberal turf sprint. That closing Sunday is also the anchor of the FanDuel Racing Turf Festival, the meet's signature closing weekend.
Racing runs Friday through Sunday through most of the meet, with a fourth day added for Thanksgiving itself. Post time is 12:30 p.m. daily, except on Thanksgiving Thursday, when the first race goes off at 11 a.m.
Why the Timing Actually Changes Your Week
Here's the part that turns a schedule into something worth planning around. Thanksgiving falls on Thursday, November 26 this year, which means the track's bonus holiday card lands the same day a lot of Del Mar households are pulling a second leaf out of the dining table for relatives flying in from out of state. Two days later, Saturday, November 28, is the Hollywood Derby triple-header. The day after that, closing Sunday, is the four-stakes Turf Festival finale.
In a typical year, a fall meet spread across mid-October through late November gives the neighborhood room to absorb race weekends one at a time, mixed in with ordinary weeks. This year, the biggest three race days of the entire season sit inside a five-day window that already has the highest volume of visiting family and holiday errands of any stretch on the calendar. If you're hosting out-of-towners over Thanksgiving and someone in your group is even mildly curious about the track, this is the year it takes almost no planning to walk them over for a graded stakes race on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon. It's also the year the roads around the fairgrounds, Jimmy Durante Boulevard and Via de la Valle in particular, are carrying both holiday traffic and race traffic on the same afternoons, rather than one or the other.
Getting There Without Losing the Afternoon
The track sits inside the Del Mar Fairgrounds, close enough to the Village that walking is a real option if you're already downtown for lunch or a coffee run. Race days draw a heavier crowd than an ordinary November weekend, so if you're planning to be there for the closing weekend's graded stakes, plan to arrive well before the first post at 12:30 p.m. rather than timing your entrance to a specific race. Surface lot parking fills fastest on the biggest cards, and closing Sunday, with four stakes races on the docket, is about as busy as the fall meet gets.
If your plan is dinner reservations rather than a day at the rail, book early for the week of November 23 through 29. Restaurants near the Village tend to fill up around Thanksgiving on their own. Add a closing weekend that's drawing racing fans from across the county and a Saturday night table can disappear faster than it would most other Novembers.
A Different Kind of Fall in the Village
None of this changes what Del Mar has been every fall for over eighty years: a place where "the turf meets the surf" is more than a slogan painted on a sign. What's changed this year is the shape of the calendar around it. A shorter meet, a later start, and no Breeders' Cup this time mean the season reads less like a spectacle and more like a neighborhood tradition, one that happens to be sharing its biggest weekend with everyone's Thanksgiving plans.
If you've lived here through a few of these fall meets, you already know the rhythm of a normal year. This isn't quite that. Plan your reservations, your parking, and your Thanksgiving week guest itinerary with the knowledge that the track's loudest weekend and the holiday's busiest one are, for 2026, the exact same three days.
Questions about how the neighborhood shifts through the seasons, or what a particular stretch of Del Mar looks like day to day, are the kind of thing Louis Alayza fields regularly from both longtime residents and people just getting to know the area. Let's Connect if there's a corner of Del Mar you'd like a local read on.
