TICKETS for Royal Ascot at York are being sold off at bargain basement prices - because a London promoter can't get rid of them.

Front Row Promotions is offering Grandstand tickets for the last three days of the festival, including Ladies' Day, at £40 and Yorkshire Course tickets at £15.

The London-based ticket agency bought up hundreds of tickets for the horse racing festival expecting them to sell at top prices, but have been unable to shift them to punters.

Now the firm says it has at least a hundred tickets a day to sell and wants to recoup some of its losses by marketing them on the cheap.

Tony O'Mahony, Front Row Promotions managing director, said there had not been the Ascot boom the company expected.

But tickets bought from Ascot Racecourse for the Royal Meeting have almost been completely snapped up.

An outpost office was set up yesterday at York Racecourse to sell the remaining Grandstand and Yorkshire Course tickets for Tuesday and Wednesday.

Mr O'Mahony said: "I expected it to be really good. It was going up to Yorkshire and it was going to be something different. It doesn't seem to have been what we thought. We have about 100 tickets a day left and rather than leave them, we thought we would get something back for them."

Updated: 10:13 Tuesday, June 07, 2005