Customer Reviews

Cars Piston Cup Track Set

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(27)

 

 

This is a great toy! My 4 year old cars fanatic loves it! This is made specifically for the die-cast cars that most of us have already purchased! At first I was a bit skeptical because of the price (especially what it's selling for on ebay)and because I was unsure it would actually do what it says. But.... it does! The booster actually moves the cars swiftly around the track. My son lines them up and lets them continuously push each other through the booster. It also has a place where the crew chief sits, a winner's circle stage and a small section where you can sit some car fans. In addition, there is a pop-up car that your child can avoid with the lane changer. My son hasn't quite mastered this yet because the cars move so fastly through the booster so we usually use the lock button to keep it from popping out. The only thing that I can really find wrong with it is that it does use batteries fast(so stock up)and although durable enough it could have be made more so by making less sections that need to be put together. It is not a toy (if you have young ones) that you will want to be taking down and putting up every day, so if you have room to keep up like we do it's great! It's not overly large, but does take up decent space in the corner of our room. All in all my son and... daugter(7) are having a grand time with it and it will definitely please your cars fan! I hope this helps someone because I could not find any real reviews out there on this toy when we were purchasing and I am so glad that we bought it anyway!

We had the same experience. The motor drive quit working after a couple of cars went through. As an engineer, I wanted to see if it was easy to fix it for my 6 and 4 year old grandsons. I took the screws off the bottom of the drive unit and found that the motor was working but that the large drive gear on the motor side had come un-snapped from the rubber drive wheel. After putting it back together and having the same problem I noticed that the four posts on the rubber drive roller that go up into the large gear will just come out of the slots in the gear because the slots in the gear are oversized. I put small wood wedges in the slots to hold the posts in place and then put "Gorilla Glue" on each one to hold the posts in place on the gear. It has held up through 3 days of hard use. The posts on the opposite gear had been glued to the gear at the factory--and the slots are just big enough to snap over the posts without the posts coming off. This is not something that anyone should have to do but it beats no track or the hassle of a return.

We have several race tracks, and this is our favorite. It's durable, fun, and fast! And keeps my 5 year old entranced for long periods of time. You can buy other die-cast Cars cars through Amazon, and they work great (Sally, Nitroade, Sheriff, etc). The space in the middle of the track is large enough that my son can lie in the center while the cars race around him. I highly recommend it. It's sure cheaper on Amazon than at Toys R Us, where I bought ours!

Our set worked for a total of 30 seconds on Christmas morning. Luckily, we had a plane to catch so my son couldn't dwell on it.

I followed the advice of another reviewer here and glued a couple of the internal parts together (their review describes the process accurately). So far it's holding up fine. Mattel offered a voucher to purchase another Mattel product, but they couldn't guarantee when this set would be available again. My son said he wanted his Piston Cup track even though the motor wasn't working.

Now it's working and he has the best of both worlds, but I'm very disappointed that Mattel would put out something so badly designed that it breaks in less than a minute. The fix was relatively easy, but be careful with the little washers that go on the gear posts...take the back off very slowly to see where they go.

My 4-year old son flipped when he saw this set up for him on Christmas morning. He had a blast sending his cars through the booster around the track. Throughout the day, I would say we had it turned on for a grand total of 20 minutes. We settled down to play with it again later in the afternoon and...the motor seems to have burned out :(

Two cars shot through and then it instantly died. I went out and purchased new batteries, thinking that was the problem, but it didn't help. This is really unfortunate as my son absolutely loves this toy. We will try and take it back tomorrow to exchange it for another one. If that one breaks, then we'll give up on this toy and hope the something better is made in the near future.

I'm not saying not to buy this toy. Just make sure to hang on to the receipt if you do.

I, like many others, bought this for my son for Christmas and imagine our disappointment when after putting it completely together we found out the booster wouldn't work. We tried multiple batteries and found it wasn't that. Appears to be a defect since many others had the same problem.

We bought this for our son in September for Christmas. It worked for about 15 minutes before the infamous booster problems shut us down. The tears on my son's cheeks were tough to take. Called Mattel and they offered a voucher for another product, $36, but I needed to pay to mail the broken booster back. I followed the advice of an earlier poster and glued one of the gears together and its worked ever since. We have run it over 10 hours since without a problem.

The good: My son loves this thing. He would play it all day if we let him. Works with most of the obvious Cars. Not sure who would think Sarge or Filmore or Red are Piston Cup race Cars. Sally, McQueen, Doc, Chick, King, Boost, The other race cars and Ramone all work for us.

The Bad: Having to glue together a part because of shoddy Mattel workmanship. If yours stops find the posting from early Jan to find the fix. One of the booster wheels comes apart and you need to glue it to make it work. Also, not the highest quality plastic track, which leads to flying Cars.

I would have given it 4 stars if I didn't have to glue mine together to make it work. Please call Mattel if yours breaks just so they know its a bad design.

We bought this for our son for Christmas and it too, stopped working after about an hour of play. We did everything but rewire the thing to get it to go again but to no avail! My son was so disappointed, he tries to get the (one!) car to go around by himself. What a piece of junk!

We purchased this set a couple of months before Christmas from a local toy store and did not set it up until Christmas morning. We had no problems with assembly - your kids should be racing in under 30 minutes. The track assembles easily, stays together well and features steep banking curves, which is a good thing because the booster motor is pretty powerful and has no problem sending the cars around the oval with some serious speed. In fact, if a car flips over and skids through the booster watch out because most times it'll send it flying off the track!

Most of the cars in the series will work on this track but the best (naturally) are the racers: Lightning, Chick, King, Nitroade and Leakless. Sally, Doc, Boost, Sheriff, Flo and Ramone work pretty well also. Mater, Fillmore, Lizzie, Guido, Luigi, Red and the other tuner cars (Wingo, Snot Rod, DJ) do not work very well (or at all) due to their size and/or profile.

We have not experienced any of the problems with the booster motor that others have commented on despite a pretty hard break-in period by our almost 3- and almost 4-year old boys. They've already logged at least 20 man-hours on this thing. I've read all of the other (mostly negative) reviews and maybe a bad lot of these things made their way onto Amazon around Christmas?? I don't know that ours won't crap out tomorrow but for now it is working fine.

You will go through batteries with this thing (it takes 3x D-size). We've gotten about 6-8 hours but your mileage may vary.

In summary:

THE GOOD
* Easy assembly
* Good fit and finish
* Most CARS diecast vehicles work well on it, and even some Hot Wheels/Matchbox cars work too
* Decent value for the price we paid ($40-$50)
* Fun - my kids love it and the adults will have fun too!

THE BAD
* Uses lots of batteries

THE OTHER
* Needs a decent chunk of floor space (2' x 6')

Nothing new to add except that our track crapped out after 5 minutes, too. It was 5 minutes of fun, though. I am crossing my fingers that Mattel might release a 'fix' of some kind for the motor. I feel terrible for people who paid $100 and up for this track on other websites.

We also purchased Criss Cross Crash by Hot Wheels for my son, and if you are looking for a track that works--that one does (with Hot Wheels or Matchbox cars only). It's set up right next to the now extinct Cars track.

Make this right, Mattel and Disney Pixar.