My review of Intimidator 305 Lite. UPDATE! 5/31/10

This discussion = fail

Boneplaya... my bad about the fail math... for some reason, I thought MF opened in 1999, lol.

Party like it's 1999!

To continue the review of Intimidator 305, I just got back from a few rides on it. I rode it when it first opened (I live 20 minutes away), and rode it a few times today. Now it's just useless. The biggest drawback to the ride before were the restraints and the fact that I occasionally banged my jaw on them. Well, the transitions are still abrupt enough that I banged my jaw again. The speed, though, is just poor. It almost feels faster going UP the lift than down the drop. You sort of hang forward into the restraints all the way down that drop. There's still a bit of grey-out. But the 2nd hill is very slow at top, and then there are the transitions. The brakes that were originally on the one bunny hill are gone, but the speed isn't enough now to make for any notable airtime anyway there. All that follows is the roughest transition, and that's still a problem. New restraints would help. And if they could fix the wheel wear issue, perhaps the brakes could be removed. I hear they were having an terrible time with wheels. But why that wasn't anticipated is beyond me.

Speaking of braking, I finally got to ride the Hurler, too. What a completely dumb ride now. All airtime is gone thanks to 2 brakes at the bottom of the first drop. So the turns are still rough and rigid, and the airtime is gone. So what's the point of the ride? It's a poor design (all right turns), and now has no speed or airtime.

And the Grizzly - running fairly well - has had ALL of the trees cleared inside the slow, high turnaround. So what's the point of that?

On the plus side, they actually were running FOUR trains on the Rebel Yell AND RACING them.

That's a disappointment. Does anybody know what the new top speed is?

It's safe to say it's in the 80's now.

Well, I did hear a rumor that around mid June-ish that they will replace the current OSTR's in favor of the "seat belt straps". I know that this was taken about a week ago, but I don't know if everyone else knows.

Yeah, it's still odd they put that there. It was rumored they were to be installed this week, but they weren't.

[Dirk_Ermen]

And I heard another story that they have removed the seatbelt straps test seat again. Oh well, I'll see how I'll view the ride on the 14th and 15th. [:)]

UPDATE.....

Just rode the coaster today on 5/31/10. They've at least removed most of the brakes from the drop! I myself actually couldn't see any trims while on the first drop. But, I did notice that theres not the airtime there used to be on the 2nd hill. The entire ride is much better than the first change and almost as good as how it originally is.

Theres 2 possible reasons for this change. The first and most likely is they are experimenting with the ride. The feedback was probably negative with the tremendous amount of trims so they removed most of it. Theres a chance it might go back to how it originally was (which would be the best result).

The 2nd possible reason is that they remove most of the trims on days of high guest count. Today there was a huge amount of guests compared to friday 5/28/10 I went there. So, maybe they give people close to the real deal on high number guest days and add the brakes on low capacity guest days. I FIND THIS REASON HIGHLY UNLIKELY THOUGH.

But, looks like things are going good and they are tweaking the ride to how they think would be best.

That's definitely good to hear. Thanks for the update! Any news on the seat belt straps?

The seat belt straps are exactly the same as of now.

Honestly, if they keep this ride fairly intense. I think lapbars would be a bit too much for people to handle. People would be flailing around all over the place if they just had lapbars and seat belts. I myself would love that, but its already quite intense. When they did the original adjustment (the lame one) just lapbars and seat belts woulda been fine and people woulda handled it.

I bet wind and empty early morning test cycle speeds have more to do with it than negative reviews.

Yeah, I'm glad to hear that atleast they're playing with the settings. But as for installing and removing breaks on busy and slow days, I think that's irrelevant. Too much effort on the parks behalf to go up 300ft to reinstall the trims every week...

[Blade]

Originally posted by dimmusak


The famous blackout turn - this is nowhere near as intense as it used to be, only in the very back seat do I gray out a bit when it used to be every seat was a super intense experience.

About how long did you blackout before they added the trims?

I didn't hear anyone else say anything about removing trims so until I do (from these people who follow it a ton) I'm skeptical. I think you might have just not noticed them as much as expected or something. Not gonna say you're wrong though, as I don't know myself.

Just went back today. They added the trims again and the coaster is lame again. Looks like they are really experimenting and trying to get whats best or possibly safest. But, when the ride has so many brakes, makes me not want to ride it.

I really don't think they changed it back and forth...people would've been debating to no end about it. I think you just had a bit of a different experience based on the day.

[Brtnboarder495]

It's hard to evaluate it without any quantitative data .. so I agree with dcs. It does seem odd that they are constantly adding/removing trim breaks on the fly like that.

I do however believe the 80 mph figure that was noted by rcdb. Sounds just right based on the pacing over the first hill in relation to the pacing over SROS SFA's first, 160' hill. The turn is a bit longer which bleeds off a few extra mph, meaning they're probably going right around the same speed at the base of the first hills.

[Mikey]

Can someone explain to me why any half-way sane maintenance department would go up nightly to add or remove a very expensive and heavy set of magnets from a section of track that is very high off the ground. This obviously requires man power and equipment to do, so I am skeptical that they are continuing to toy around with it almost everyday.

Its understandable. I'm just telling my experience.

I rode Intimidator 305 last Saturday (May 29). I thought it seemed quite slow compared to its former self. Sunday night (May 30), it seemed somewhat faster. Fact is, coasters tend to pick up speed during the day. Perhaps that is why it was suggested that some brakes had been removed?

However, as of this weekend, a friend of mine who's ridden the ride many, many times, told me that some brakes WERE removed. It's not what it was at the start, but he said it's better than last weekend. He also said all brakes have been removed from the bunny hill, and some brakes were removed from the downhill brakerun to get the train into the station faster.

So we can hope that more brakes will be removed as they "play" with this ride to determine what is a speed the public wants and what works with their wheel issues (if that's the cause of the braking).

I'm glad someone else has similiar experience as I do.

6-14-10

I saw what they did today. They moved the brakes up to a higher part of the drop rather than near the bottom of the drop. Thats how the speed went faster.