The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Steel Vengeance thrills by surprise
‘Hyper-hybrid’ ready for season debut
Steel Vengeance, Cedar Point’s newest thriller with steel tracks set atop a wood frame, has been two years in the making.
It was worth the wait, said riders who came out for the Sandusky-based amusement park’s media preview for the ride.
Cedar Point bills it as a “hyper-hybrid,” a new moniker for the world’s first steel-on-wood roller coaster to top 200 feet.
“It’s such a different and unique coaster experience for Cedar Point,” said Cedar Point General Manager Jason McClure, who got his first ride a couple weeks ago, when construction was complete. “It’s steel, smooth track on the big wooden structure. It’s fast, it’s smooth, but it’s intense too.”
The ride has new tracks grafted onto the timbers of the former Mean Streak, which debuted in 1991 and once was the world’s tallest and fastest wooden roller coaster. Cedar Point in 2016 announced Mean Streak would be retired.
Rocky Mountain Construction converted the ride. The company specializes in rejuvenating
“It’s steel, smooth track on the big wooden structure. It’s fast, it’s smooth, but it’s intense too.” — Jason McClure, Cedar Point general manager
wood roller coasters with new metal tracks, but Steel Vengeance is its first work in Cedar Point.
It is a challenge dealing with the complexity of a roller coaster more than 5,000 feet long — along with Ohio weather, said Fred Grubb, owner of Rocky Mountain Construction.
“To have people come off of it, smiling, laughing, telling you how great a ride it is, it’s all worth it,” Grubb said.
Wild west attitude
Set in Cedar Point’s FrontierTown area, Steel Vengeance has a Wild West motif. Cedar Point has created characters with a back story to match the coaster’s new personality.
But the morning of April 25, Steel Vengeance was cloaked in fog.
The weather made it seem quiet — maybe a little too quiet.
That is, until the 24-passenger train began its clanking journey 205 feet up the first hill.
The train crested, then went vertical, plunging 200 feet straight down.
On every train, riders let out screams of fright and delight.
“I actually like the down drop the best. It’s 90 degrees,” Grubb said.
“It’s a little intimidating,” McClure said about the first hill. “The cool part about keeping the old Mean Streak structure and expanding it … it’s imposing. We built a monster back here in the back of the park. It’s a little bit intimidating but it’s a great experience going straight down to kick
off the ride.”
The hill was the first of numerous rises and falls and twists and turns of a 5,740-foot track that loops back within its own wood structure.
The train reaches 74 mph and logs 27.2 seconds of “airtime,” the feeling of passengers rising up from their seats. It is the most airtime of any rollercoaster in the world, according to Cedar Point.
Wild or mild?
The riders included brothers Adam and Marc Goodyke of Kalamazoo, Mich. They got on the first train of the day when Steel Vengeance began operating at 5 a.m.
Cedar Point had published video animation of what the ride would look like. The brothers said they watched it online “countless times.”
Steel Vengeance is even
better in reality, they said.
“I try to temper my expectations a little bit,” Marc Goodyke said about their first ride. “It not only met them, it surpassed them. There’s not a dull moment on this ride. They hit a home run.”
“I kept thinking in my head, ‘wow, wow, wow,’” Adam Goodyke said. “There’s so many surprises in the ride because a lot of the ride … you can’t see everything from the midway because a lot of the ride is within the structure of the ride, so there’s a lot of hidden surprises within the ride.
“I kept being surprised,” he said.
The brothers grew up taking family vacations to Cedar Point. As adults, they have visited at least 15 theme parks around the country, strapping into at least 150 various roller coasters for ride totals now
numbering in the thousands.
Last year they began posting their roller coaster love online through The Chain Lift, a YouTube channel dedicated to all things amusement park. The brothers were among the social media journalists selected by Cedar Point to be guest reviewers of Steel Vengeance.
The brothers agreed the mix of steel and wood is a winner. It has the massive feeling of a wood frame, the height and speed of steel tracks and the intensity of modern coasters like Cedar Point’s Maverick, they said.
“It mixes in the best elements of a lot of different types of rides,” said Adam Goodyke, 33, who by day works as a graphic designer.
Better each time
The brothers set a goal to ride Steel Vengeance 10 times.
After seven rides, they said it kept getting better.
“I actually enjoyed it more than ride one,” said Marc Goodyke, 34, who works as a medical component assembler. “I noticed the more I rode it, the more I loved it. And I loved it the first time, it was already one of my favorite coasters of all time.”
Getting to know the elements on the ride enhanced the experience, they said.
McClure said some of his
favorite elements of Steel Vengeance happen as the track turns back on itself, carrying the trains back through the posts and beams.
“It makes you feel like it’s not going to make it through there, but it actually does,” Grubb said.
Those visual effects work, the brothers said.
“It’s a little disorienting with the inversions,” Adam Goodyke said.
“And there’s so much wood and track,” Marc Goodyke said.
“Sometimes it’s hard to tell if you’re sideways, upside down, straight,” Adam Goodyke said. “But I think it’s cool. Definitely a lot of surprising elements in the ride.”
With Steel Vengeance running, the brothers said it is time for coaster enthusiasts to shuffle their rankings of favorites.
“Sometimes it’s hard to tell if you’re sideways, upside down, straight.” — Adam Goodyke of Kalamazoo, Mich.