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No Strings Attached
Thunderbird

Thunderbird is a large ride for a small park. Image: PowerPark

For years now, there has been an obsession with blind enthusiasm for coasters that have opted for Norwegian lumber as their building material of choice over the more modern standard of steel.

So many times have I seen coasters being built that look frankly average at best, yet it seems that the expectation is there for enthusiasts to exude almost hysterical amounts of enthusiasm just because it is wooden.

Of course, many wooden coasters are simply amazing. The Grand National, Tonnerre De Zeus and reportedly Falken at Fårup Sommerland can all take on the best of the steelies, but I find it ironic that when a coaster unique to Europe is in the latter stages of construction, I can barely find any acknowledgement online, let alone excitement.

Thunderbird is the first GCI wooden coaster outside America. Yet there is barely a blip on the radar. It is the first coaster inside Europe to use the Millennium Flyer trains, trains so bendy they make a slinky look like a steel girder.

Yet this year Black Mamba, Stealth and Speed Monster are the forum fodder, while Thunderbird barely gets a passing mention.

My experience of GCI coasters is limited to just Gwazi at Florida’s Busch Gardens Tampa. Memorable? Yes, certainly. But good? No, a generally fruitless coaster if ever there was one. But Thunderbird does actually look like it has the potential to be an excellent coaster.

At 88ft high, it is the tenth-highest wooden coaster in Europe, and has all the usual trimmings of a GCI twister – sweeping turns, highly banked helixes and swooping drops. Thunderbird doesn’t appear to be an airtime machine, but has many interesting elements, banked drops and surprisingly warped track that goes left where other coasters would probably go right.

The Millennium Flyer trains aren’t dissimilar to the rolling stock you can find on rides such as Tusenfryd’s Thunder Coaster, but instead of three rows per car, there is just the one, the entire train comprised of 12 cars. This means that while Vekoma’s noble effort is unwieldy and lumbering, the Millennium Flyer trains are capable of far more aggressive manoeuvres.

It will be interesting to see whether GCI have addressed the perennial complaint that the lap bars become uncomfortably tight throughout the ride, though.

This is a monumentally large coaster for a monumentally nondescript park. With only a Vekoma Boomerang, small family coaster and a handful of karting tracks, it looks like Thunderbird will have a similar effect on PowerPark as Megafobia did 11 years ago, despite the apparent lack of interest from enthusiasts.

Fair Rides on the Move

Top Buzz 2, left, is returning to the fair circuit under Crow's management. Space Roller, right, is coming to the UK thanks to Mellors (Image: Mondial)

Sometimes there is something strangely ungratifying about toiling over an argument as to why British fairs are improving just as one of our best rides, Crazy Shake, gets packed up onto the next boat to the Netherlands.

But, the tide of change that I spoke of in Issue 12 is coming in, and it’s coming in fast. Although I foresaw exciting times ahead for the British fair, I don’t think even Nostradamus’ most exciting prophecies could have predicted the bumper year 2006 is set to become.

Undoubtedly the most exciting prospect is James Mellors’ Space Roller, possibly the first full German-spec ride to make it over to these modest shores.

Built for Kinzler, owner of possibly the most lavishly presented Breakdance in the world, then sold onto Switzerland’s Maier (also known for his high standards in presentation) and then onto a French showman, Space Roller is one of the best looking Mondial Top Scans in the world.

With a full-sized backflash and platform, this will be one of the largest spin rides in the UK, squeezing onto three loads, much like James Cox’s monstrous Move It. Amazingly, with the ride only announced a month or two ago, it is set to make its first appearance at Leeds Fair in February and has already arrived in the UK.

It seems strange to think that following a year where not one Top Scan travelled, with Top Buzz 2 returning to the fair circuit there will be two. Originally owned by Elliot Hall, under Harry Ayers’ so-called ‘management’ Top Buzz 2 then briefly toured a few London suburban fairs before being jettisoned to Margate for the 2005 season.

Alan Crow bought the ride during the winter, so we can look forward to this excellent attraction returning to the fair circuit early in 2006, and the prospect that both Space Roller and Top Buzz 2 will be battling it out for your custom at Newcastle Hoppings in June.

While two Top Scans helps bolster our previously pitiful count of Mondial rides, so too does Walter Murphey’s Capriolo.

Credit to Murphey for avoiding the temptation to go for the smaller Furioso, the Capriolo shows that in tough times British showmen are willing to take a gamble while most German showmen are generally curling up in the face of adversity.

While the Capriolo is often compared to the Fabbri Booster for reasons of clarity, it really is like comparing a Merry-go-Round to a NASA Centrifuge.

With all riders at one end of the arm and a counterweight on the other (along with a token hovercraft-style fan mounted above riders’ heads), the Mondial ride is a higher capacity ride, and with brakes on the gondola, you can be positioned so that you make headfirst downward loops offering probably the most intense of G-forces and A-forces (A being any) you can safely expect a ride to exert.

Another unique ride we can expect to see next year is the country’s first Technical Park Moondance. Like fellow-Italian company Fabbri, Technical Park are often mocked for their timeless ability to shamelessly copy other manufacturers’ rides on a shoestring.

Ironically, Moondance is a vague copy of Fabbri’s Contact, using a turntable mounted to an arm that rotates at a 45-degree angle. Unlike Contact, though, Moondance tips up to an angle of 80-degrees, although omits the turning hubs in favour of a large circle of seats mounted around the turntable’s circumference.

The first Moondance opened last year in France as Dreams Live in France, and although it receives only lukewarm reviews (it is apparently very uncomfortable), it is another example of British showmen upping the ante against competitors, whether British or European.

We all know it takes two to tango, so come Easter we should have two Tangos to tango. On top of Billy Crow’s already-touring Equinox, Perrin Matthews has purchased the original Tango from The Netherlands, the previous owner selling the ride to make way for the KMG Afterburner XXL.

That showman is Kroon, who also premiered the immense Move It (32), and is set to receive the first Afterburner XXL, followed soon after by Swiss showman Maier.

At 140ft tall, the Afterburner XXL is an absolute monster. At full swing, you will be as high as M&D’s [not so] Giant Wheel, Mellor’s [not so] Big Ben and you will be looking down on all but eight of every single ride reviewed on Coaster Kingdom.

Not everything about XXL is large, though. With 20-people per ride sat in an inward-facing square formation (four groups of five), the statistic of 780 people per-hour is probably as modest a statistic that you’re going to expect from the XXL.

This isn’t a monumental problem, but for a three-trailer ride (as big as modern spin rides really get), XXL has the potential to have an XXL price to go with it to make up for less people per hour.

So while 2006 appears to be a particularly buoyant season for the UK fair industry in particular, Germany from what I can tell is only getting one Fabbri ride, Atlantis Rafting, and losing a Mack Log Flume, Piraten Insel, which is moving to its new home, Skyline Park (home of Skywheel).

Despite the Germans being frugal when it comes to buying rides, no concessions are made with their presentation as Jens Vorlop shows with Atlantis Rafting.

As a Fabbri ride, I challenge you to find a better example of polishing a turd – with a temple-like station and faux-stone pillars supporting the lift, Atlantis Rafting could almost pass off as a decent ride.

Identical to the Reverchon version, the Fabbri river rafting ride is pretty decent, and debuts at probably the only time a German showman could probably get away with a cheap Italian off the shelf ride, even though it comes hot on the heels of the spectacular Wild 'N Wet. Continues....