Hot Wheels Wall Tracks review

Regular visitors to this blog will know that, as well as moaning about Tranmere Rovers, mocking the good people of Newton-le-willows and reporting on various social events as if I'm some kind of man about town,  I also use Ear I Am to share some stuff about my family.

Because of this I'm on various lists of 'Mummy bloggers' even though I'm a Dad, but hey, it is the 21st Century. 

Believe it or not, this means I get approached from time to time by various companies who ask me if I want to write about their products. Usually it's a no - although I did make an honourable exception to report on a great McCain's oven chips social media campaign once. They rewarded me with some gardening tools for the kids and a load of vouchers for frozen oven chips.

The latest message to pop up in my inbox came from Mattel, who are pushing some new Hot Wheels toys. Did I want to sample them? 'Obviously' I'm not interested in using my kids as stooges to market commercial products, but Adam loves Hot Wheels and if there's some for free, we'll have them!

Fair play, the Mattel people duly sent through a huge package containing boxes of their new Wall Tracks range - so I guess I'm duty bound to review it.

It's a good idea. Those of you whose kids have Hot Wheels at home will know that it takes up loads of space on the floor, which can be a pain. Wall Tracks, as the name suggests, stick to the wall so don't clutter the place up so much. 

It needs an adult to set the thing up but it says on the box that it takes 20 minutes, but it's less than that, which is a relief. I remember spending six hours building a playmobil fort once (build time: 1 hour. Eh?).

The only problem I can see is that the tracks won't attach to wallpaper. This is an issue for us. We have a decent sized four bedroom house but I could only find one small area of bare wall where I could fix the tracks. This meant I couldn't use everything I'd been sent as samples.

Anyway Adam seems to like it so well done, Mattel people. Here's what the expert thought...