Mark Walton: danger gets a bad press

I’ve just finished reading Action Park, subtitled Fast Times, Wild Rides, and the Untold Story of America’s Most Dangerous Amusement Park. Written by Andy Mulvihill, with journalist Jake Rossen, it’s a funny and affectionate look back at the theme park opened by Mulvihill’s father, Gene, in the 1970s.

Accident Park, as it became known, now enjoys a legendary status in American pop culture. Gene Mulvihill, the self-styled ‘Walt Disney of New Jersey’ was a property developer who bought the Vernon Valley ski resort back in 1972. Keen to attract guests during the summer off-season, he built a steep, two-lane bobsleigh track out of concrete, and invited thrill-seekers to race down on simple carts with shopping-trolley wheels. With no safety equipment or speed limits, it was an invitation to rip the skin off your elbows.

Mulvihill Junior’s memories of the resulting carnage sum up the book’s dry humour: ‘Attendants would tell guests to go slow and mind the brake until they got used to it. The guests would nod, completely oblivious to the safety instructions, then proceed to make every mistake they were warned to avoid. If you stuck your arm or leg out to balance yourself, it was like holding your body against a sander…

‘For superficial injuries, we sprayed a pink iodine liquid that bubbled up like acid and made the tender skin flare with pain. The teenage boys took it stoically. Younger kids hissed through their teeth. On busy days, the area around the slide could look like a leper colony.’

The success of Gene’s Alpine Slide encouraged him to develop more rides and slides, transforming his wooded mountainside into one of America’s earliest water parks. What didn’t change, however, was his approach to health and safety. ‘My father seized upon the idea that we were all tired of being coddled, of society dictating our behaviours and lecturing us on our vices,’ Andy remembers. ‘He vowed that visitors to Action Park would be the authors of their own adventures, prompting its best-known slogan: “Where you’re the center of the action!”’

Or, as it turned out, centre of the accident.

Action Park also had a Motor World, which featured a mini circuit and pint-sized single-seaters. These weren’t go-karts – they were proper racing cars, built by Lola and imported from the UK. Powered by 300cc Wankel rotary engines, the Lola T506 could do 70mph and seemed designed to draw teenagers into inadvisable wheel-to-wheel battles. Again, Action

Park just let them get on with it. You had to be at least 17 and present a valid driving licence, but Andy admits that kids with fake licences were casually waved through: ‘My father told us that we should never utter the word “no” to guests. Snow White, he said, would never reject anyone.’

It’s that freedom – that rejection of risk aversion and the championing of personal responsibility – that people remember most about Action Park, years after it closed. The book had me wondering, what would Gene think about our approach to danger and risk in 2020?

Then I saw the latest news about Airspeeder. If you haven’t heard of it, Airspeeder is a new race series for electric flying cars, promising a grid of piloted drones going wing-to-wing around a remote desert course. They look like 1960s F1 cars with the wheels replaced by drone rotors. Sounds crazy, right? When I saw the prototype at the Goodwood Festival of Speed last year, I admit I thought the whole project was doomed. I mean, there’s the technology hurdle: with its slender carbon body and eight 60bhp electric motors, the Airspeeder will have a better power-to-weight ratio than an F1 car. Then there’s the whole – y’ know – flying-and-crashing thing.

But now Airspeeder has announced it’s ready to hold an exhibition race in the Australian Outback next year. ‘Le Mans, Bathurst, Monaco, these amazing places where we’ve seen the birth of new sports,’ said founder Matt Pearson. The race will be held in a place called Coober Pedy.

If Airspeeder really happens, my faith in humanity will be restored: maybe, as a species, we’re not so obsessed with safety after all. Build a vertical concrete slide with no safety rails, and somebody, somewhere, will always be dumb enough to throw themselves down it.

Editor-at-large Mark Walton loves a good risk-assessment form. He particularly likes the sound they make as you crumple them into a bin