Volume 3, No. 15. August 8,2003
Successful
formula
When he was a student
at England’s University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology,
Alex Payne hoped to become an engineer in the Formula One racing world. Instead,
he stayed close to home and became senior engineer for Blackpool Pleasure Beach—where,
10 years later, he became an engineer in the Formula One racing world.
Sort of.
To celebrate the new fleet of Mercedes cars at the amusement park’s 1960-built
Grand Prix ride—and those new cars’ sponsorship by Formula
One racing team Jordan—Blackpool Pleasure Beach Managing Director Geoffrey
Thompson promoted this year’s craziest publicity stunt in the industry:
running a real Jordan Formula One race car on the Pepsi Max Big One roller
coaster. Grand Prix Rookie driver Ralph Firman, a longtime veteran of British
kart racing and the Japanese circuit, was to “drive” the car over
the 235-foot-high (71-meter), 5,497-foot-long (1,675.5-meter) Arrow hyper coaster
track.
“My initial reaction was, ‘Right, OK, that could be fun,’”
said Payne, tasked with pulling off the stunt. “My initial technical reaction
was concern about drag.” Countering conventional contention among Pleasure
Beach staff that he was overreacting to the potential problem of drag since
this was, after all, an aerodynamic race car, Payne knew from his own final
year studies of race cars in college that Formula One cars use drag as down
force to stabilize a car. “A racing car is aerodynamic when it has 900
horsepower behind them shooting them along.”
Jordan’s car not only wouldn’t have that horsepower, it didn’t
even have an engine, which was removed so Payne’s team could bolt the car
to a Big One train chassis. That was only after doing computer profiling
and template measurements to make certain the car, longer than the chassis and
wider than the coaster’s train, would fit through the whole course of the
Big One, which passes through two tunnels, three other rides and itself
twice. The tightest fit was in the station itself, where the tires squealed
as they rubbed along the loading platforms, Payne said.
Meanwhile, the Jordan team stressed that Pleasure Beach’s engineers maintain
the integrity of the car. The wheels, stuck out to the side, proved the biggest
challenge because on a race track they support the car. On the Big One,
the car bolted to the chassis supported the wheels. “All the loads were
reversed,” Payne said, requiring special heavy duty plates bracketing the
wheels to the chassis. Furthermore, because the engine had been removed from
the back of the car—an engine which is integral to the integrity of the
car's construction—Payne had to stiffen the car body to make sure the back
end didn’t fall off on the Big One’s first drop.
“Now we’ve got the car on our chassis, we’re happy that it physically
will move around the whole circuit and won’t disintegrate while doing so,”
Payne said. Two days before the July 24 event, Jordan’s car took its first
plunge on the Big One, a track that, when the wind is strong, will stall
a sandbag-filled coaster train weighing 7 1/2 metric tons (16,535 pounds). Jordan’s
car, weighing 400 kilograms (882 pounds), stopped just beyond the first hill,
which it surmounted going “inches per hour,” Payne said. “It
was very gloomy seeing how bad the drag would be. That’s when everybody
knew how right I’d be.” Not that Payne took an “I-told-you so”
attitude because the drag was worse than even he expected.
Back at the shop, the Pleasure Beach engineers removed the car’s brake
cooling ducts and radiator, which “You need on a race track, but you don’t
need on a stunt like this,” Payne said. He blocked off the air intake valves
to the engines and polished the car with a better surface finish. “It was
a small advantage, but every little bit helps.” He then added airflow panels
and increased weight on the chassis. Twenty-four hours later, test two ended
with the car stalling two-thirds through the track—right behind the park’s
new Big Blue Hotel (THE LOOP,
July 25, 2003).
“It was 8:30 in the morning, and people in the hotel woke up to see a Formula
One car stalled on the roller coaster track and a bunch of guys working on it
as if it were a perfectly normal thing,” Payne said. “They were waving
to us and asking us to pose for photographs.” Test three an hour later
ended with the car stalling at the same location, allowing the hotel’s
late risers their own photo opportunity. After a consolation breakfast during
which Payne did some figuring on a napkin, he added another 150 kilograms (330
1/2 pounds) to the chassis before the next try.
That next try, though, was the actual stunt itself with Firman sitting in the
cockpit. “I shook his hand, wished him a pleasant ride and said, ‘See
you when you get back’ with a serious face,” Payne said. Exacerbating
the situation was a strong wind. “I wasn’t confident,” Payne
said. “I was hopeful, but I wasn’t confident.”
Firman rode the car all the way through. “He came back, stopped in the
brakes at the end of the station and stood up to wave to the crowd,” Payne
said. “I went away and sat on my own for five minutes to recover.”
Like Payne, the Jordan crew did not tell Firman ahead of time the car had never
made it through the Big One during testing. “The moment he got back,
they went to him and said, 'We’ve got a confession to make,'” Payne
said. “We all conspired against him.”
Thompson claimed a new world record for a race car riding on a roller coaster
track, and while so much work went into the short-lasting stunt, Payne felt
it was all worth it, for the park—“It was all over the media, and
there was a big, big crowd at the ride”—and for himself. “Blackpool
Pleasure Beach is all about innovation, Geoffrey Thompson is all about innovation.
He’s really up for the dramatic statements and things nobody’s done
before. He has a knack for seeing things where you initially hold your head
in your hands saying ‘What a crazy idea,’ and then it turns out to
be the proudest moment of your professional life. He’s uncanny in that
way.”
THE LOOP is written and produced by Eric Minton, Minton Enterprises, LLC. To see more examples of Eric Minton's work and Minton Enterprises services, visit www.ericminton.com.
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