Israel's Race Tracks —
The Complete Guide (2026)

Let's start with our home track, and not just for sentimental reasons: the Arad race track is one of the most compelling facilities for performance driving in Israel. It sits at the gateway to the Judean Desert, run in partnership with the Arad municipality, and operates under approval from the Ministry of Culture and Sport and the Performance Driving Authority — meaning that when you drive there, you're inside the legal, regulated framework of motorsport in Israel, not on its fringes.

On the asphalt itself: 14 technical corners alternating between late-braking zones, S-combinations, and fast openings, across varying configurations. There's an organized pit lane, a paddock, and a spectator area that holds up to 1,000 people — a number that makes Arad the only track in the country where a personal driving experience can turn into a full event with an audience: family at a birthday, friends at a bachelor party, or a whole company on a team-building day.

The dry desert climate does quiet but important work: few rainy days, excellent visibility most of the year, and cool mornings that suit both engines and drivers. If you want to go deeper, we wrote a full guide to the Arad race track driving experience, including what a full driving day there actually looks like.

MotorCity in Beer Sheva is the largest, most ambitious motorsport project ever built in Israel: an entire park built to international standards, bringing a race track and a karting complex together under one roof. For the industry as a whole, it's genuinely significant — a facility at a standard that lets Israeli motorsport events run at a level recognized abroad.

On the national track map, MotorCity is the natural choice for anyone coming from central Israel and looking for a closed facility built to a modern standard, and its karting complex is an accessible entry point for anyone who doesn't yet have a license or the budget for a real car. It's worth saying transparently: EXR doesn't run experiences at MotorCity — our home is in Arad and Nes Harim — but a fair guide to Israel's tracks has to include it, because it's a central part of the picture.

In the Jordan Valley, near Moshav Petzael, sits a closed track familiar to anyone who grew up in Israel's motorsport scene: the Petzael circuit. For years it served as a training ground, a club meeting point, and a venue for driving events, and it remains a landmark in the industry's collective memory here. Its geographic advantage is clear: the valley is relatively accessible from both Jerusalem and the north, and the rural atmosphere around it is a world away from the urban facilities.

For anyone surveying the track map ahead of deciding where to drive, Petzael completes the picture as the third closed-facility option, alongside Arad in the south and MotorCity in the northern Negev. Together, the three of them make up, as of 2026, the entire supply of closed race tracks in Israel.

And there's one more kind of track, one with no fence and no grandstand: the mountain roads. The Nes Harim area in the Judean Hills — about 30 minutes from Jerusalem — offers an unbroken sequence of curves, climbs, and descents, and open scenery that feels like an Alpine mountain pass transplanted into the middle of the country. It's not a racing venue, and you can't "extract the maximum" from a car there the way you can on a closed track — and that's exactly the magic: a guided driving experience at a controlled pace, where the emphasis is on reading the road, flowing between corners, and the scenery running past the windows.

EXR runs personal and couples' driving experiences in Nes Harim with the same professional framework as the track: a briefing, a certified instructor beside you, insurance, and photography. If you're torn between the two worlds, we wrote about it at length in our guide to the Nes Harim driving experience.

To save you from opening four browser tabs, here's a single comparison of all four venues, based on what actually decides your choice:

A fair bottom line: if you want to drive a real sports car yourself — with an instructor, insurance, and photography — the accessible route today runs through an organized driving experience. EXR runs experiences like that at two of the four venues in this guide: the Arad race track and Nes Harim.

The good news: you don't need a performance driving license, you don't need a modified car, and you don't need to know anyone. An organized driving experience solves every link in that chain of barriers — the operator brings the car, the certified instructor who sits beside you, the insurance, and the approvals. You bring a valid driver's license and the right mood.

Here's how it works for us: you choose a car from the fleet — the Corvette C6 with 450 hp, the Mitsubishi EVO X, or the BMW M240 — you choose a venue (Arad or Nes Harim), and you get a day that starts with a briefing and ends with video and photos of your sessions. The price range is public: from about ₪1,000 (~$270) for a roughly hour-long session up to about ₪8,000 (~$2,160) for a full day. If it's your first day on fast asphalt, our guide to a first track day will settle your nerves, and our choosing guide will help you decide on a car and format.