Customer Reviews

BluTrack 24' Challenge Pack

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I bought this for my child, remembering the orange Hit Wheels track I had as a kid.

The photo in the Amazon listing shows a configuration with 3 loops and a banked curve. The cars will NOT complete that course - gravity just does not provide enough oomph to get a car through all of that. The best I could get a car to do is to go around a single loop, and that was with a 10' drop from the starting point to the loop.

This is not rocket science (and I am an engineer) - there is just no way that a car will go through that sort of complicated design. I am not sure if the track has too much friction or what, but the cars just don't go fast enough to make it through. I tried brand new cars right out of the package, so it was not like they were too bent up. I tried old cars I had from when I was a kid (a lot heavier / more metal). None worked very well.

Still, even with a single loop it is fun. Just not $70 worth of fun. $19.99 would be about right.

A better alternative is the 4-lane Raceway track:

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I actually bought this for my son's (age 10) science fair project, but it has been worth way more as a toy. After years of buying matchbox racing sets, he got a lot more playtime with this set. I should have bought it way sooner! He can configure the track to be anything he wants and doesn't need my help putting it together. Best of all there are no little annoying pieces that are left all over your house or to get lost.

My son got this gift for Christmas a year ago. He loves it. He still asks several times a week to set up his race track. We set it up and take it down whenever he wants to use it. He loves the set as does his 3 year old sister. As for a children's perspective, it is great. He can set it up by himself to do basic races and jumps. The loops on the other hand are frustrating for him to create and require adult assistance. An older child would probably be able to do them without any problems. The track works with any type of matchbox sized cars / trucks / etc that your child has. The blue track itself is very durable but the plastic ramps that come with it break easily at the tabs. With younger children that aren't as gentle with their toys this can be a problem. My daughter and son have both stepped on or otherwise broke the ramp tabs which makes using the ramp difficult since it doesn't hold the track properly.

As a whole, I would recommend this track. Even at the young ages of my children, I would buy it again. You can order replacement ramps if you need to and the joy that they have with it is priceless.

My 5 and 3yr old sons received this as a gift and have a lot of fun with it. We haven't tried making any loops with it, we just run the track down the stairs and they have a blast.

I thought $70 was not too much for a toy with open-ended play, and BluTrack is pretty good at what it does but with limitations. There are not enough stiffening bars that ship in this box. That's number one. Number two: when you connect two ramps together to make a larger 90-degree ramp for bigger loops, the ramps don't snap together well at all. I would have liked better interlocking snaps because to work around the wobble/fall factor you have to use twisty ties or whatever around the house. Oy!

Once you get the track set up, and with a few refinements like tweaking spacing, you can get some Hot Wheels to do a big loop. I rigged the track to a wall at five feet up only, not 10 feet, for a vertical drop, and the Hot Wheels cars made it through the loop right to the end of the track. Would the cars make it around several loops? Some would. Really, if you want cars to make several loops, you need pull-back/wind-up Darda cars.

That brings me to Darda cars. You could just buy a couple of Darda tracks instead. You wouldn't get the two-lane racing or the very long straightaways with/without hills, and you don't get the flexibility of wrapping the track over things like tables, staircases, etc. It all depends on what you want. The Darda "build your own" track set is also over $120.

BluTrack appeared to be better than the competitors' tracks. They were more flexible and two cars could race at the same time.