Pallas Karting – Tynagh, Ireland

Situated about an hour’s drive away from Galway, I decided to add Pallas Karting to my holiday itinerary when staying near Galway. What caught my attention about Pallas was that they have the longest karting track in Europe, with a 1500m track.

Pallas Advanced track allows you to go up to 85kph with their Thuderkarts, perfect for putting your skills to the test. You can book a package for occasions such as stag parties, hen parties, student and corporate parties. You can also just book for yourself and a few others. For younger drivers and novices, there is the 500m Beginners Track where speeds of up to 55kph can be reached.

karting experience

When you arrive at Pallas, you will be given a balaclava and gloves and shown where to choose your outer jackets and pants. They are waterproof so if it is raining out you don’t need to worry about your own clothes getting wet.

Next up there is a short safety briefing video which shows you how to enter and exit the kart safely, rules of the track and what the different flags mean. Pay close attention to these because they will be very useful while you are out on the track.

Once everyone is clear on the track rules, you’ll need to pop your balaclava, gloves and helmet on. They’ll show you to your kart. Be sure to remember what kart number you are in so that at the end of the race you can collect your results with the number of laps and lap times you did.

For smaller individuals (such as myself), they’ll flip the pedals to the shorter size, and put a separate seat in the kart. Since this was my first time ever karting, I was a bit nervous but on climbing into the cart, my first objective was to get comfortable with it. Similar to learning to drive, I figured out the sensitivity of the steering wheel and the sensitivity of the peddles. Taking it easy for the first lap I managed to get a feel for the track and the kart. It took about 3 laps before I started pushing the speed once I felt comfortable. By lap 5 I felt like I’d mastered the track and time flew by!

Before I knew it, the end of race flag was out and it was time to drive back to the start line.

This was definitely one of my favourite experiences on my holiday! I loved the feeling of pushing my limits and enjoying the ride. I’ll recommend this to anyone, regardless of if you have tried karting or not.