Fun but queues are awful
The activity itself is fun, however the queues are unreal. I paid directly to the company and not through any deals or vouchers, so was at £250 already for my partner on his birthday to drive 5 cars for 3 laps each. Our booking was for 10am, he never got into his first car until 11.45!! - I kid you not. New groups and people were arriving and joining in big groups before we even got to car 2, so the queues never went down.
At that point, so his birthday wasn't totally ruined, I just went and paid to upgrade everything because the expensive car queues were empty (The huracan has 2 cars making it far quicker queue than all the others, the Ferrari upgrade however was a multi hour queue wait so we didn't upgrade that one). In total after upgrading and adding on the drift car for 2 laps, ended up being around £400 so that we didn't have to stand in an hour long queue for every single car (which I'd already paid £250 for). The photo package at the end is £60 to get all your photos and videos, so my day came to around £460 in total for something I feel £250 - £300 should've been enough for.
So basically if you're willing to pay tons, you can have a good session of it and a really good time. If you're not, be prepared to wait in queues for the experience you've already paid loads for. I wouldn't advise you upgrade before getting there, as on the day you can see what queues are the best/worst and decide from there.
This is as far as I can see, the only negative people review the track/company on, so they really need to find a better solution. I'd never of paid extra for this if it hadn't of been a 30th, and just decided to stick it on my credit card and deal with it later. But it's disappointing when you're already paying hundreds to then also have to wait 1hr45mins to get into the first car. I'm not aware of any other experience that makes you pay so much, then makes you wait in a queue all day to actually experience it. They need a better system for this especially if you're unlucky and it's freezing/windy/raining (luckily it was good weather for us). I'm sure cars not working on the day didn't help and sent that car's queue to other queues. Why they don't have other backup cars for this happening I don't understand, or have a booking system where only X number of people can book out a certain car in this time slot then future bookers need to pick a different car and the overbooked one is no longer available. Or just upgrade people to empty queues when one car is out, they are still paying plenty and the fault is on your end, not the customer's after all.
Drivers were great, staff were nice, pictures were good, not all the videos worked and on our checking at home bits cut out in the videos or had the giant Ingliston banner covering my partner and the instructors face for the whole video (which isn't great given I paid £60 for them).
The drift car as a passenger is great if you've not been part of the driving experience all day and just watching, felt a bit like a rollercoaster hill to me for how fast it accelerated. Really good fun.
The non manual cars I would say seemed to be far more fun, as they are easier to swap gears on than the fully manual gear stick one at high speeds, when the track length is at it's end in just a few seconds.
Overall we had a good day because we paid more to avoid queues, which isn't something everyone would be comfortable doing, and isn't something I feel an already expensive experience should have you doing. You should pay more because you are interested in a particular car, not £30-£40 per car to skip to a better smaller queue.
April 20, 2024
Unprompted review