Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 73
 Hours of FUN! August 27, 2007
M. Sheppard (NJ United States)
35 out of 35 found this review helpful
My son got this for his 3rd birthday. He absolutely LOVES it! It is so easy to set up and then folds back down for easy storage. He has great fun racing down the cars and then looking to see who was first by which flag pops. WHile it is recommended for 5+ years, it is certainly a great toy for even the younger ones!
Lots of fun May 29, 2007
A. Hasting (New York)
53 out of 56 found this review helpful
I use this toy for speech therapy and it is a lot of fun. It is easy to set up and is fairly sturdy-I gave it 4 stars for durability because it will collapse if the child leans on it, but mine has not broken, even with rough toddlers. (However, I don't doubt that determined and unsupervised toddlers can do permanent damage to any toy.) The track segments, which typically just fold together, can become detached, but again, they've never broken. I just snap it back together. The release mechanism is easy for little hands to manipulate, including children with some fine motor problems. Older kids like that there is an impartial way to judge the winner (as opposed to just "eyeballing" it). There are little plastic things (flags?) that pop up when hit by the cars, and the first one to be pushed up shows through a little window at the bottom of the track. No arguments about who won.
I like that it does not require batteries, keeps children's attention, and has quick and easy set up. As far as educational value-well, I'm not a teacher, so I don't feel completely qualified to judge. I believe it would facilitate teaching the concepts of ordinal numbers (first, second, etc.), stop and go, fast, slow, turn taking, mine, yours, supposition (guessing which car will win), some basic physics (again, in guessing which car will win, due to size, weight, aerodynamic features), win, lose, future and past tense (will win, won)... probably other things.
Good buy. I've used it with girls and boys, ages 2-11, everything from autism to cochlear implants to phonological processes. I believe typically developing children would like it as well.
Grandma Linda October 27, 2007
Linda Petrocelli (Sebring, Florida, USA)
27 out of 27 found this review helpful
I was looking for a toy my three grandsons (9,6 & 3) could play with together when they came to visit. They all love cars, so I picked this up in a store just as something to keep at my house. They all loved it. It went together so easily, and doesn't break, even when it gets toppled over. Best of all it packs up in minutes and can be put away in a limited amount of space. I am now purchasing one for my twin grandsons, who live quite a distance away, but enjoyed it also during a recent visit. Most race track toys have room for only one car at a time, which causes problems, but because this track has room for 4 cars, they all get to enjoy it and compete for the title of "fastest" car. I love it.
My kids' most popular toy -- EVER! January 16, 2008
LANCE R LINDLEY (Yokosuka, Japan)
18 out of 18 found this review helpful
For Christmas, my car-obsessed four-year-old son wanted the Hot Wheels Flip-n-Go Spin City Playset. "No way," I told my wife. We've had bad experiences with those modern Hot Wheels "closed loop" playsets: they are flimsy, hard to put together, and my children quickly lose first interest, then pieces. Reviews on websites confirmed my suspicions about the durability and attention lifespan of the Flip-n-Go, which is not cheap, either. Then my search led me across the 4-lane Raceway, and I knew right away that it was going to be a winner. This "old school" raceway requires no batteries, it folds and unfolds to set up and store, and - unlike the toy equivalents of screensavers that Hot Wheels is cranking out lately (like Flip-n-Go), which offer mindless repetition and limited interactive possibilities - this Raceway has unlimited replay potential, because it has a POINT: finding out which Hot Wheels car is the fastest! Unavailability forced me to buy mine on Ebay for more than double the list price. I don't care; I still think it was a great purchase. It has proved to be everything I had hoped. It is easy to set up and put away, and it's nice and big when set up, and conveniently small when stowed (and it even has a carrying handle). It has proved completely durable, even in the hands of 8- and 4-year-old boys, and occasional abuse by a 15-month-old when his brothers forget to close their door. And, best of all, it gets hours of use every single day. Just as I predicted, it has become the one toy/game that draws my two oldest sons together to play in a cooperative manner, as they try endless combinations of their many, many Hot Wheels (and other brand) cars on the four lanes to see which will come away with Boy's Room Bragging Rights. When I come home from work, I don't have to ask where the boys are -- from their upstairs room, I can hear the unmistakable sound of Hot Wheels cars sliding down the plastic track followed by excited shouts. Educational? I wouldn't have thought so, but my sons even put their imaginations to work setting up a Tomy railroad to transport cars from the bottom of the raceway back to the starting gate so they could station one person at each end and keep running races without having to get up and carry the cars (laziness - not necessity - appears to be the mother of invention!). The oldest has begun to spend his allowance money on new Hot Wheels cars instead of saving up for video games, and both of them have started to scratch the surface on such scientific concepts as the impact of aerodynamics, weight, and wheel/axle condition on a car's performance on the gravity-based raceway. I caught the 8-year-old "cheating" by taping pennies to the bottom of his beloved blue Enzo Ferrari, a concept he learned at the Cub Scout Pinebox Derby, in a vain attempt to challenge my world-beating Porsche Carrera GT3 (yes, I get involved, too!). If there is one drawback at all, it is that the place indicators, which are cleverly designed to pop up and show the order in which cars finished, are not always accurate. For some reason, lane 2's indicator seems to always beat the others to the winner's circle, when it is visually obvious a car in a different lane won. Of course, there's no convincing my sons of this, especially when my GT3 is not on lane 2... but this is pretty minor, considering the unprecedented amount of play time this toy is getting. After less than a month, it is clearly the most popular toy any of my boys have ever received, over skateboards, bikes, RC cars, speed stackers, and a million other things they just HAD to have.
Great toy for little ones.... December 6, 2007
Memphis Mom (Memphis, TN USA)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
This has stood up very well to my rough 4 year old and his friends. He has learned to assemble it himself (I keep it on a shelf when not in use) and put it away when done. It is a lot of fun and he enjoys seeing which cars will go the fastest. Unlike a lot of hot wheels tracks, this one is compatable with almost all of his cars.
Get the thing at WalMart for less than twenty bucks, don't pay ANYONE a almost a hundred. This guy must be dreaming.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 73
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