A new roller coaster that has every indication of being one of the world’s scariest opens on Saturday in North Carolina.
There is, however, a bigger one coming. Much, much bigger. And crazier. Florida is planning the world’s tallest roller coaster, to be completed in 2016, that will wrap round and round a tower of shops and restaurants 570ft up in Orlando.
On Saturday, Fury 325 opens to the general public at the Carowinds amusement park in Charlotte, North Carolina. With a hair-raising drop down an 81-degree slant from the first 325ft rise, it will be the world’s tallest and fastest “giga” coaster – a category featuring rides between 300ft and 400ft.
A video taken from a camera on the front of the first car on a test run earlier this month gives such an accurate rider’s point of view that it affords a thrill without actually having to take the plunge – or line up and buy a ticket.
Fury 325 pulls riders up to the top in 40 seconds before a 10-second dive from 325ft that reaches 95mph. The ride does not loop-the-loop but instead relies on twists, turns and dips that give passengers a sense of weightlessness.
But no sooner was Fury 325 generating news than the Orlando Sentinel got into party-pooping mode by pointing out that while that was all very impressive, the so-called Skyscraper roller coaster that will be completed there next year, for expected opening in 2017, will put North Carolina’s offering in the shade.
The video of Skyscraper may be a simulation but it shows a ride that, for sheer unconventionality as well as record height, marks it as a novelty. Riders will be repeatedly flipped upside down as the rails corkscrew around a central tower, as shoppers and diners at the establishments inside the tower watch them whizz by.
Skyscraper’s top speed is planned at “only” 65mph, stately compared with Fury 325 and the world’s fastest coaster, the 149mph Formula Rossa in Ahu Dhabi.
But with a planned height of 570ft, it will surpass the world’s current tallest roller coaster, the 456ft Kingda Ka in Jackson, New Jersey.
