Five euros for ten minutes: Europe's 25 cheapest kart tracks

A cheapest-in-Europe list is easy to make and easy to get wrong. The cheapest line on a price list is often not the ticket most people buy: it is the Tuesday afternoon rate, the student rate, the second session of the day. We expected this to be a geography lesson about where karting is cheap. It turned into a lesson about how tracks name their tickets.

The ranking is simple. Of the 880 tracks we list, 431 publish a plain adult session we can compare, and we convert each to what ten minutes of driving would cost in euros. Twenty-five land at 10.0 euros or less, fourteen are under 10, and only four are under 8.

5.0 EUR

ten minutes at the cheapest track we have found

17.1 EUR

what the middle European track charges for the same

4

tracks in all of Europe under 8 euros per ten minutes

The cheapest track in Europe is in a forest

Gaspedal, near Löffingen in Germany, sells ten minutes on what its price list calls a Wald-Kart, a forest kart, for 5 euros. That is less than a third of the European median, and it is a flat ten-minute session rather than a long block divided down, so no arithmetic of ours stands between the published price and the table.

Behind it, BAJTEL Gokarty in Zabrze sells twenty minutes for 50 zloty, Forssan FK -rata rents a kart for 10 euros a quarter of an hour, and Karting centar Jagodina gives you half an hour on a Sodi for 2,500 dinar. Those four are the whole of Europe under 8 euros. Out of 431 priced tracks, that is how thin the bottom of the market is.

The list

Eleven of these prices have a condition attached

Read the ticket names rather than the amounts and the list looks different. Motodrom in Kraków calls its 85 zloty rate a Tuesday promotion, and Fórmula Karting Granada sells its 15 euro quarter of an hour on Tuesdays that are not public holidays. Centro de Ocio Luis Miguel in Boceguillas is at 10 euros on Black Friday. Kart Center Landau is at 10 euros on Frauentag. L'Indykarte is Wednesday afternoons in term time. Tours Kart Indoor wants you to be a student and a member. First Kart'Inn wants a membership card and a second session on the same day, which is also what the two France BattleKart entries are: the price of your next race, not your first. Memel GP is birthday week. Motokáry Praha is a school or youth group rate.

Eleven of the twenty-five cheapest prices in Europe are for a particular day, a particular person or a second lap of the same afternoon.

We are keeping all eleven in the table, because they are published adult prices with no package attached and no group minimum, which is the rule we wrote down before we looked. But a reader planning a Saturday should know that the list is partly a list of Tuesdays.

What the geography says, once you allow for that

• The top half is central European and the bottom half mostly is not. Ten of the first fourteen are in Poland, Czechia, Serbia, Lithuania or Romania. Everything from fifteenth place down is a 10-euro ticket, ten of them in the west and one in Slovakia, and there are eleven of those tied at exactly the same figure.
• Poland sells time, not tickets. Four of the 25 are Polish, and every Polish entry is a 20 or 24 minute session rather than the ten minutes most of Europe sells. Karting Arena Kraków and Motodrom are both in Kraków, which we did not expect of a big city.
• Thirteen countries make the list and the obvious absences are northern. No British, Dutch, Swedish or Estonian track appears. The cheapest ticket in any of those four starts at 11.6 euros, so they miss by more than a rounding error.
• Cheap does not mean small print all the way down. Carbonia Racing Arena in Most and Motokáry Břeclav both publish a plain ten-minute session on a named 270cc kart, at 8.3 and 9.9 euros. Those two we would be comfortable quoting to a stranger.

The one we distrust

Thirteenth place bothers us. Motokáry Praha's 230 koruna figure is filed as a per-driver rate for school and youth groups, and our rule excludes anything with a group minimum. The page states none, so it passed. We think the rule caught a price it was written to keep out, and we would rather say so than quietly drop a row. If the track tells us there is a minimum party size, it comes out.

Tell us where we are wrong

Every row above is read from the track's own website and carries the sentence it came from. If your price is out of date, or if a ticket we treated as a walk-in rate is nothing of the kind, the correction form reaches a person and we will change the table. Corrections on the conditional prices are the most useful ones you can send us.

We will publish this again when enough prices have changed to move the order. On the evidence so far that will be a slow business, and the forest at the top looks safe for a while.