Ok chaps, I’ve done some maths to try and work out roughly how fast ‘Project Dylan’ will be. When I say roughly I mean ROUGHLY. My maths is notoriously poor and I’m working with little more than guesstimates here so please, bear with me.
The nearest comparable coaster to Project Dylan is (in my opinion) Dollywood’s Mystery Mine which has 1811 feet of track with a ride duration of 2 minutes and 30 seconds. This equates to 12.07 feet per second average speed. Project Dylan has 2362 feet of track with a ride duration of just one minute forty seconds which is around 23.62 feet per second.
From this we can very clearly see that Thorpe Park‘s new ride’s average speed will be almost double that of Mystery Mine. Unfortunately looking at the average speed of the ride does not reveal too much, the slow lift hills and the rapid vertical drops obviously affect the average quite a bit.
To put these highly ambiguous figures into some kind of perspective here is a list of a few of my favourite coasters and their respective feet per second counts.
- Nemesis: 29 fps
- Rita: Queen of Speed: 43 fps
- Stealth: 50 fps
- Project Dylan: 23.62 fps
So, from that we can see that Project Dylan is unlikely to break any records for speed, the drop remains the main draw of the attraction. At 97 degrees it will be one of the steepest the UK has to offer. All things considered I think it is fair to assume that Project Dylan will have a similar overall pace to Nemesis (which just so happens to be our very favourite coaster here at Play and Stay®). These numbers taken into account I’m expecting top speeds of between 50 and 60 mph and I’m pretty confidant that I’m right.
This last bit is purely conjecture, nothing more than my humble opinion on this thrilling new ride at Thorpe Park. I have a bit of a theory, Project Dylan is going to lean even more heavily on the horror theme that I originally anticipated. I predict that Thorpe Park’s new ride will be as much a grown up ghost train as a roller coaster. It will be heavily themed, there will be sections inside the planned sawmill that will probably employ animatronics or even just convincing models to give passengers a fright on their way to the beyond vertical drop. In short, this ride is going to be A for amazing.
