The price of ten minutes: what karting costs across Europe

Ask what a go-kart session costs in Europe and you will get an answer in a unit nobody shares. Poland sells eight minutes. France sells ten. Britain sells fifteen, or half an hour. Estonia sells eight minutes for a flat 20 euros at every single track we have on file, which we will come back to, because it is the strangest thing in this data.

To compare any of it, you have to pick one measure and stick to it. Ours is the cheapest plain adult session a track publishes, converted to what ten minutes of driving would cost, in euros. Not the fanciest kart, not the race night, not the group package. The ticket a person buys when they turn up and want to drive.

17.10 EUR

what ten minutes costs at the middle track in Europe

429

tracks with a plain adult price we could compare

2.3x

between the cheapest country and the dearest

Half of Europe's priced tracks come in at 17.10 euros or less. A quarter are at 14.20 or below, a quarter at 20.00 or above. That is a tighter band than we assumed before we started, and it holds across some very different economies. What moves is not so much the price as the portion you get for it.

The table

Estonia is doing something odd

All eight Estonian tracks in our data sell an eight-minute session for 20 euros. Not roughly 20. Exactly 20, at every one of them, from Käina on the island of Hiiumaa to Kuningamäe in the middle of the country. That works out to 25 euros for ten minutes, which makes Estonia the most expensive country in the table and the only one with no spread at all between its cheapest and dearest track.

We have no evidence about why, and we are not going to invent any. What we can say is that it is not a rounding artefact of our own method: the prices are 20 euros as published, in euros, on eight separate websites.

Czechia's middle price is 10.70 euros. Estonia's is 25.00. Same continent, same ten minutes of driving.

Three other things worth knowing

• Germany is cheap and enormous. Fifty-eight German tracks publish a comparable price, more than any country except France, and the middle of them sits at 14.90 euros. France is four euros higher for the same ten minutes, and the Netherlands three and a half.
• Poland spans nearly the whole table. Its cheapest track, BAJTEL Gokarty in Zabrze at 5.80 euros, is well under anything in Czechia, and its dearest at 26 euros is above Estonia's flat 25. Silesia sells long sessions cheaply; the big cities sell eight minutes at western prices.
• The dearest track is not in the dearest country. A French track at 55 euros per ten minutes is the steepest figure in the data, and Germany, third from bottom on the middle price, has one at 42. Estonia, dearest country in the table, stops at 25. A country's typical track and its most expensive track tell you different things.

What tripped us up

The first version of this comparison was wrong, and the way it was wrong is worth passing on to anyone doing the same exercise.

Our first pass counted anything with a price and a duration. That let in track hire by the hour, all-you-can-drive tickets and four-hour event blocks, all of which look like bargains per minute and none of which is a session you can walk in and buy. We now take only per-person sessions of at most 30 minutes with no package attached. It moved the European middle price by 30 cents and it moved several countries a great deal more.

Two more faults surfaced while we were writing this series, and we fixed them before publishing. Some tracks price a two-seat kart, one ticket covering a driver and a passenger, which is a price per kart and not per person: a German post caught it. Others sell multi-session cards, "10 x 12 Min." or "2 x 8 minut", bulk discounts rather than an arrival ticket. Both are now excluded, which took the European middle from 17.30 euros to 17.10 and dropped 18 tracks out of the comparison.

Then there were the pages themselves. One German track appeared to charge 1,200 euros for a session: the real figure was 12,00 euros, split across two HTML elements so the comma vanished. Two Romanian prices were wrong in different ways: one was a struck-through old number our reader had taken as current, the other belonged to the Grand Prix block further down the page rather than to the session it was filed under. A Belgian price turned out to be the weekend tariff, read as the everyday one. All four are fixed. We expect there are others, and the fastest way to find them is for somebody who knows a track to tell us its page is wrong.

If you run a track

Every number above is read from a venue's own website and carries the sentence it came from. If your track is in the table with the wrong price, or is missing from it because your price list is a picture rather than text, we would rather hear from you than guess. The correction form goes to a person.

We will run this again as prices change. Kart prices move slowly, so the next edition will be worth publishing when enough of them have.