Drayton Manor's X-Car Coaster

http://www.rcdb.com/id2926.htm

It looks like a longer version of the ride Magic Springs is adding... except not really!

Has anyone ridden this thing? Either it's an amazing little ride or a torture machine. The loops look great and that camelback insane but looks can be deceiving.

And how does that lift hill work?... if it even qualifies as a lift hill, that is.

It definetly takes the cake for the most rediculous looking coaster ever built.

This is listed as an X-Car Coaster, but the track and trains are both very different than Magic Spring's new ride.

This UK model looks like it has a pretty intense layout, but being built by Maurer Sohne, I would guess that it should be fairly smooth. The cars look rather comfortable and there is no OTSRs (interesting because in watching the ride video from their website the train seems to hang in the first loop before dropping)!

The train drops out of the station, and then I believe it uses LIMs or some form of magnetic propulsion to launch the train up into the first loop. Looks like a lot of fun. Any CBuzzers from the UK ride this little terror?

I have a friend who loved the original X Car Coaster (the one in Germany... Magic Springs is getting a clone of that one) and rode the Drayton Manor one last summer. His verdict was that it ran terribly! Loud and shaky. But, another of my friend rode the one in Germany last fall... and it aged badly. Shaky and rough.

I've been on it. It is very loud, but it wasn't shaky at all; the problem I had was that the restraint liked to tighten itself to the point of pain. Trip report here -

http://www.bannister.org/coasters/trips/2005/0925.htm

Many people seem to have this problem with those lapbars: They come down on you during the ride (the Skywheel has very high g-forces while passing through the station several times).

Obviously the short pain of headbanging on OTSRs is contrasted with the pain and "uncomfyness" in your underbelly.

@TWISTER: There is no LIM or extra propulsion during the ride. The liftchain is modified in a way that it can lift a car up a vertical- and even an inverting incline.

The lift on G Force is a chain lift similar to the lift of Skywheel and the new Magic Springs coaster. You can see what it looks like in the video on Maurer's site (just click on "Xtended Roller Coaster" and then "Drayton Manor Video" in the column on the right.) *** Edited 3/5/2006 1:08:13 AM UTC by person***

The ride is fine especially when you're upside down and you realise the new restraints are holding you safely.

You do get another click on the restraints whilst the ride is running, but overall this doesn't detract too much from the overall experience.

I just watched the video... wow, that's a weird little thing. It's not a big coaster but I don't know if I'd put it in the same class as a Crazy Mouse or a spinning coaster either. That looping lift hill is particularly strange.

I'd love to ride one- too bad the coaster going to Magic Springs looks so weak by comparison!

*** Edited 3/6/2006 3:03:20 PM UTC by Rob Ascough***