Yesterday was the test day at drievliet. About 500 people were invited to ride the new X-car coaster. At 12am the gates opened, i flashed my ticket and ran to the ride. I've been in the very first ride and the very last ride that day.[8D]
The ride itself:
The ride is seriously awesome but way too short. To be exact: 25 sec of thrill. The launch is kickass and the first inversion has a really nice floater and is really close to hangtime on the top: (-0.2g). The bottom of the dive loop produces a nice 4,3g and then we go into an really nice horseshoe. When we exit the horseshoe we'd fly into an insane airtime hill that drops an awesome -0.8g which is just fun! After that you'd fly into that weird cork/heartline roll which gives for my feeling a fun -0.5g hangtime. Too fun! In the 140 degree overbank (maurer calls it an 140 loop... lol!) you'd get some slight lateral g's since the speed isn't that huge anymore. After the final turn your on the brake discussing with everyone that it was just too short.
Theming and stuff:
There was no real theming yet, but during the season they are going to add more scenery and they are going to enclose the station too.
Special stuff:
During the day still alot of rollbacks/refuses to launch happened. I enjoyed myself twice from an rollback. The best from this launch system is: When the launch notices halfway the launch that it doesn't launch fast enough. It disabled the launch so the car will only make it up halfway the height. To reduce the possibily to stall somewhere in the middle of the ride. The bad thing about a rollback is that the ride opps have to puch the car MANUALLY back to the start of the launch. And yes, you've got to be strong to do that!
Allthough i've been one of the only 6 lucky peeps that day that seriously enjoyed an SLOW ride! The launch was not fast enough but the launch kept going. So eventually we finished with like 2 sec hangtime in the first inversion, crawled though the horseshoe. Floater over the airtime hill and crawled though the corkline with like 4-5 sec hangtime [8D]. The reactions from the folks in the queue were awesome since everyone thought we were going to stall! And the best thing yet: It's all on tape! Watch the video at the end of the trip report, it included first ride onride, slow ride, PIV, and some pushback material. [:D]
Enough talking, here are the tons of pictures:
And last but not least, The video:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=DjfuzZi_prs