Why this exists
My son started karting at Dunkeswell in Devon. Before his first session I wanted to know three things: could he actually drive, what would it cost, and how long would we be there. None of those were straightforward to answer.
Minimum ages turned out to vary from three to seventeen depending on the circuit. Height matters as much as age, and plenty of tracks publish one without the other. Prices are quoted for sessions of different lengths, so a £35 session and a £46 one can be better or worse value depending on details nobody puts side by side. And more than once I found a track's own booking system contradicting its own marketing pages.
The existing directories were no help. They mostly listed a name, a phone number and a scraped paragraph. So I built the thing I had wanted: every circuit compared on the same terms, with the awkward details included rather than smoothed over.
How listings are built
Every listing here is written by reading the operator's own website and writing up what it says. Not scraped, not spun, not generated from a template. The exact pages used are listed at the bottom of each one, along with the date it was last checked.
We did try automating it. A crawler read every site, an extraction step pulled out the facts, and the results were confidently wrong in ways that mattered: one circuit placed sixty miles from where it is, another filed under the wrong county, minimum ages that swung between four and fourteen for the same venue. All of that was caught before publication, and the conclusion was that the pipeline is useful for gathering pages and useless for deciding what they mean.
So the crawler still finds the pages. A person still writes the listing.
What we measure
Operators publish what makes them look good. The comparisons that matter are the ones nobody puts in one place.
- Cost per minute on track. Session price divided by minutes driving, calculated the same way everywhere. Where a circuit sells bundles we show a range, because booking three sessions is often a third cheaper per minute than booking one. Currently calculated for 10 of 27 listings.
- Minimum age and height, per circuit. Not per venue. A track with a cadet circuit from four and a main circuit from nine is two different answers, and giving one number would send somebody on a wasted journey. The youngest we have found anywhere is 3.
- Compulsory extras. Balaclavas, gloves, licence fees and deposits. Rarely in the headline price, and they turn a £35 session for two into £80.
- Group minimums by format. The thing that catches groups out, because below the minimum you either pay for absent drivers or get moved to a different format.
- What we could not find. 27 listings carry a public list of missing facts. Admitting a gap is more useful than filling it with a guess.
What we will not do
No commission on bookings. You go to the circuit's own booking system at the circuit's own price. There is no basket here and no markup.
No paid rankings. Cost per minute, minimum age and circuit length are calculated identically for every venue, and no amount of money will change where a track appears in a comparison. If the rankings can be bought there is no reason to read them.
No scraped photos. Operators own their images. Most listings have none as a result, which looks worse and is the right call.
No invented data. If a circuit does not publish its session lengths we cannot calculate its cost per minute, so we say so rather than estimating. Where a track's own sources disagree, we print both and say which we used.
Where the money comes from
Honestly, at the moment: nowhere. Listing is free for operators and always will be, and claiming a listing is free too.
Some guides carry affiliate links to equipment retailers, disclosed at the top of the page rather than buried. In future we expect to charge for group enquiries, where a circuit only pays if we actually send them a corporate day or a stag party worth having. What we are not going to do is charge operators rent for a position in a list.
Who writes it
Karting Tracks is written and run by Ben Gray, part of the CYE Group. I am a karting parent rather than a former racer, which is probably why the site cares so much about height minimums and hidden costs.
If something here is wrong, I would genuinely like to know. Tell us and it gets fixed, usually the same week.