Keep the kids entertained with Carrera slot car toys!

Looking for a way to keep the kids engaged on something that doesn't have a screen? We got into slot car racing and the kids love it! I remember playing with a slot car set when I was a kid and don't know what happened to that set. Fast forward to 2020 when everyone is spending copious amounts of time at home, we decided to try slot car racing and it was so fun.

We got a set thanks to the great folks at Carrera Toys of America, which had cars that were modeled after two cars in Disney's movie Cars and of course my little guy wanted to be Lightning McQueen. It was so fun. 

We worked together to set the track up, which was a little more involved than I remember. The cool part about the track that we got is that it included a full loop-de-loop circle and also track raisers so that one piece of the track could go over another piece of track. We quickly learned that you have to install the track guides because if don't do that, the cars will most likely run right off of the track.

At the beginning of the pandemic in the US, the 55-year-old slot car company blew through its U.S. inventory in a month as families realized they could spend quality time building their track setup, learning how to use hand controllers to operate the miniature cars, mastering the art of taking the curves at top speed without losing the cars’ grip on the track’s guide-slots, and competing against each other for braggers’ rights.

If you've never played slot-car racing before, it's simple: you have to run your car around the track using a hand controller and be faster than your opponent without running the car off of the track! That is quite hard since the controllers are quite sensitive. Somehow my little guy was able to use the hand controller at full speed without running the car off of the track - something I was not able to do.

We played a lot with the set and one thing that my dad said would be a good thing to do would be to build the set on a piece of plywood so you don't need to keep assembling and disassembling it. We've played it a handful of times so far and it's a lot of fun - one thing to watch out for is that the track connections are very brittle and we've already broken a few of them.

If you're looking to spend some quality time with the family without being in front of any screens, we recommend that you check out slot car racing with sets from Carrera Toys of America!

NOTE: We were provided with a sample set to facilitate this review. No other compensation was provided and all opinions, as always, are our own.