Eight minutes in Poland, fifteen in Britain: we price karting per 10 minutes

The first thing we tried to do with this directory was compare prices, and the first thing that went wrong was that the prices were not comparable. A track in Zabrze and a track in Milton Keynes both sell a session. One of them means eight minutes on track and the other means fifteen. Nothing on either page says so in a way a machine can line up against the other.

So we stopped comparing prices for a while and counted portions instead. Of the 871 tracks we have listed, 410 publish how long a session lasts in a form we could read. Those are the ones this piece is about. The other 461 mostly sell you a session without ever saying how long it is, which is its own finding and not a happy one.

226

tracks that sell a ten-minute session

100

tracks whose session is eight minutes

58

tracks that sell a quarter of an hour

Ten minutes is the European portion, offered by 55 percent of the tracks that tell us anything. Eight minutes is second at 24 percent and fifteen minutes third at 14 percent. After that the numbers fall away fast: 20 tracks sell twelve minutes, 11 sell five. Longer blocks exist, 46 tracks at twenty minutes, 49 at half an hour, 8 at three quarters of an hour and 15 at a full hour, but almost none of them replaces the short session. They sit next to it on the same price list, for people who have already decided they like this.

The median track publishes exactly one session length. That surprised us. We had expected a menu, and what most tracks actually offer is one portion, take it or leave it.

The boring number is the one that matters

A concentration this heavy is dull to read about and very useful to work with. If ten minutes were merely popular, the honest unit for a price comparison would be the cost per minute, which reads like a phone tariff and means nothing to anybody standing at a counter. Because ten minutes is what half of Europe already sells, converting to it is not an abstraction. For 226 tracks it is the price on the board.

The eight-minute countries are where the conversion earns its keep. Every track we have in Estonia sells eight minutes for 20 euros. Priced as published, that looks like a mid-range ticket. Scaled to ten minutes it becomes 25 euros, and Estonia turns into the most expensive country we have measured. The price never changed. Only the portion did.

A British session is nearly twice a Polish one. Comparing the two ticket prices tells you almost nothing about which is dearer.

Where each portion lives

• Ten minutes is the western and southern default. France, Spain, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Czechia, Austria and Norway all centre on it, and they are eight of our twelve biggest countries by published lengths. Nothing in the data explains why the same number won in all of them, and we are not going to make something up.
• Eight minutes is central European. Poland and Hungary both sell it as the base session, and so does every Estonian track on file. Together with Estonia that is a contiguous block of the map on a different portion from its neighbours.
• Fifteen minutes is British, and only British. The United Kingdom is the one country in the table whose typical shortest session is a quarter of an hour. This is why British session prices look steep next to French ones and British per-minute prices do not, and it caught us out before we started dividing everything down.
• [Belgium](/belgium) refuses to pick a side. Ten minutes is its most common shortest session but twelve is its median, the only country here whose middle track lands outside the three standard portions. With 15 tracks that could be noise.
• The extremes are lonely. One track sells a three-minute session and one sells two hours. Neither has company at its length, and both are a reminder that a median hides some genuinely odd price lists.

What we got wrong first

Our first attempt counted every minute value on a price page, so a track selling ten minutes of driving, a 30-minute arrive-and-drive window and a two-hour party slot arrived as three portions. Sessions, venue hire and event blocks all say minutes on the page and they are not the same thing. We now count a track once per distinct session length, and country rows use only the shortest session each track offers, because that is the ticket somebody walking in actually buys.

If you run a track

Every length above was read off a venue's own website. If yours is wrong, or your sessions changed length last season, or your price list is a picture and that is why you are not in here, the correction form goes to a person. We would rather be told than guess.

We will count again once enough tracks have changed their portions to move the shares, which on this evidence will take a while. The pricing comparison that this article exists to justify is published separately, and every figure in it has been through the arithmetic described here.