Complex neural network!

Hi all. I am a relatively inexperienced programmer, especially in C#! i decided to try to learn C# because I want to build a fairly complex neural network, designed to predict the outcome of UK horse races.

I've read several articles and source codes for neurals, but haven't seen anything that could handle my needs. I need to be able to enter 12 items of data for each horse, maximum 40 horses in a race; and have data for thousands of races which I can use to train the network. Training it looks like the easy bit at the moment, as I can't get my head around it at all! Are there any knowledgeable people here who are able to help please? I am desperate to get this project moving, and would consider paying someone to do the programming side of things for me.

Many thanks

Paul