Rita, Queen of Speed

Want to feel the Bugatti Veyron’s 0-60mph in 2.5sec but don’t have the necessary £840k?
Scare yourself silly experiencing it on Europe’s fastest roller coaster for under £30

The Bugatti Veyron was this year’s most extraordinary new car, and if anything outpowers or outpaces it this decade we’ll eat the Nomex underpants you ought to wear while driving it. It accelerates as Formula One car, hitting 60mph in 2.5 seconds. Look at your watch as the second hand counts two and a half beats and imagine how that must feel.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that this kind of acceleration is somehow normal now that it’s available in an off-the-shelf car from the Volkswagen group, either. Producing such ferocious pace is still an extraordinarily difficult, expensive and exclusive business. The Veyron was delayed by years as the engineers struggled to make it meet its targets. At £839,285, half the F1 grid can’t afford it, and only 300 people will buy one new.
But there is another way to feel that acceleration for yourself. For £29.50 you can do it all day. The queues are rather longer than for the Bugatti, but you’ll reach the front in around an hour at worst, as opposed to the year it takes to deliver a Veyron. The name is rather less glamorous – Rita – but the headline figure is the same: 0-60mph in 2.5 seconds.
Power to the people.
Rita, Queen of speed – to give her her full title – is the latest roller coaster at the Alton Towers theme park in Staffordshire and the fastest-accelerating coaster in the UK.
Appropriately, she’s designed around a drag racing theme, with the front of each train loosely based on a ’57 Chevy and the control room styled like a dragstrip timing tower. There’s even a huge puff of ‘tyre smoke’ as she takes off (although we’re not sure if she’s fully Euro4 emissions compliant). The theme also explains the moniker, drag racers traditionally being given women’s names.
Rita was built in just six months – most headline-grabbing ‘thrill-coasters’ like this take 18 – and opened to the public at the start of the year. The total cost was £8m, less than the price of 10 Veyrons.

Coaster with the moster
Rita is unique in this country, not only for her staggering acceleration but also for the way it is produced. Coaster anoraks, of whom there are many, will know the following already, but it still makes fascinating reading for those of us who only struggle to keep our lunch down once or twice a year. Coasters are divided into three main categories. Powered coasters drive themselves around the track using onboard electric motors; they can generate enough pace to scare the kids but won’t trouble most adults. The vast majority are gravity coasters, like Alton Towers’s Nemesis and Oblivion, which slowly winch you to the top of a steep – sometimes vertical – drop, before releasing you and letting gravity and momentum carry you all the wa to the end.
Very fast and truly scary.
But Rita, appropriately and unique in the UK, is an accelerator ride. Even more incredible than her headline standing-start figure is the fact that the five-car train being accelerated weighs more than some HGVs at 7.5 tonnes, plus 1.5 tonnes for 20 passengers of average weight. The Bugatti is just shy of two tonnes.
Rita’s secret power source not only yanks all that mass to 60mph in 2.5 seconds, but endows it with enough momentum to carry on around the 640-metre track with its steep climbs and tight bankings at an average speed of 40mph with no further assistance. In fact, it needs to be braked in some places. And it’s reliable enough to do it once every 65 seconds and 52,000 times in a year.
So before we get onto how it feels to let Rita crease your cheeks, we’ll let you in on how she does it. Her engine is the very best feature, but it’s hidden away in a concrete bunker at the end of the straight. As Rita prepares for each run, two 24mm steel cables ending in a hook travel slowly from the bunker back along the straight to the train waiting at the start. The hook, known as the catch-car, grabs the underside of the train.
If the 20 occupants are starting to feel nervous now, they have good reason. And they’d feel worse if they could see Rita’s hydraulics build up. Electric pumps force most of her 8000 litres of hydraulic oil into two nitrogen-filled gas accumulators. As the oil goes in it forces a piston down the tubular accumulator, increasing the pressure of the gas on the other side from 250 to 320 bar.
Instead of heading back to the tanks, the oil is directed up through eight thick black rubber hoses which attach to the outer edge of a vast drum four metres in diameter. The fat hoses whip violently as the oil rushes through them into turbines which set the huge wheel spinning almost instantly, winding in the cable and pulling all nine tonnes of train and passenger to 60mph faster than they will ever have experienced before.
From inside the engine room it’s like a scene from Star Wars or Doctor Who. With the flailing tentacles, the towering, ominous drum, the deafening whoosh and whine of the oil and cables, and the screaming coming from outside it’s as if some octopus-like alien is consuming its hapless prey. Which, to an extent, it is. Pity to bury it in a concrete bunker; they ought to have it in a glass box.

Hold on really tight
So how does it feel? Arguably, the experience is even more intense than it is in the Bugatti. Hard acceleration in a very fast car is done from behind a windscreen or a visor, your attention is focused more on perfecting your launch technique and constantly snatching gears than on the crazy rate at which you’re gaining speed. Aboard Rita, you’re a helpless passenger, fully exposed to the wind – and in our case rain – with nothing to think about other than the strange things being done to your body. The initial movement, when it finally comes, is surprisingly smooth and jolt-free, though you’d be advised to rest your head against the seat back.
‘Adrenaline rush’ is a much overused phrase, but medically that’s exactly what happens to you next. Looking back on it you’ll be mightily impressed by Rita’s colossal, seamless power, but at the time all you notice is fear, badly blurred vision and a strange chemical reaction in your torso. It’s worth queuing for.
But does Rita match her claims? On our figures, not quite. We attached our Racelogic V-Box GPS-based timing gear to her and recorded a 3.2sec run to 55mph. This was, however, conducted early in the morning in cold, wet conditions and before she was fully warmed up. Her operators assure us that she is much faster in better climatic conditions and at the correct operating temperature. She felt plenty fast enough to us. One supposedly rugged road tester refused to make a second run during our exclusive figuring session. We won’t embarrass him by mentioning the fact that a large party of 13-year-old schoolgirls rushed excitedly back to the start of the queue after the first public run.
Each ‘train’ is made up of five, four-passenger ‘cars’, each made of box-section steel with fibreglass bodywork. On either side, clusters of wheels with polyurethane tyres grip three sides of the tubular steel track. Once you’ve accelerated down the main straight and get into the long twisty section, Rita handles like she’s on rails, the nine-tonne train jinking left and right like a go-kart but without the jolting. She pulls a peak of 4.7g through the bankings – 5g is the maximum permitted on roller coasters by our health and safety guardians, and for no more than half a second – and she travels so fast that it’s almost impossible to believe that only momentum is propelling you.
Despite solid tyres and no suspension the ride is very smooth. The brakes are mighty, too. They’ll never fade because there’s no physical contact – they’re just massive magnets mounted in the track whose attraction to the train slows it as it passes over.

Showing restraint
Comfort isn’t quite in the Bugatti’s league. The seats are hard but each journey lasts no more than 55 seconds. Safety is as impressive as you’d hope. A combined central bar and chest restraint lowers over each passenger and latches in place. A belt links it to the seat base, but this is only really for the benefit of nervous passengers – it never comes under load during the ride.
The Veyron requires you to stop and insert a second key before attempting a maximum-speed run and Rita has a similar feature. Two attendants check that every passenger is correctly strapped in. If satisfied, each pushes an all-clear button their control booths on either side of the track. Once both are activated control is handed to the dispatcher in the tower. If any of Rita’s sensors detect a fault he won’t be able to send her off. When rolling there’s nothing to stop Rita completing the circuit, but if for any reason she didn’t build up enough momentum to make it to the end, she’ll simply roll all the way back to the start.
The servicing bills are pretty hefty, but what else would you expect for a £8m, 640-metre structure weighing 640 tonnes and entrusted with the safety of 20 people at a time? Rita gets seven man-hours of maintenance each day, including using a cherry picker to conduct a visual inspection of 10 per cent of the track, which at London main dealer rates adds up to over a quarter of a million quid each year in labour alone. The tyres are replaced every six months – bizarrely, there’s a wide choice of supplier – and the cable every year during her overhaul in the park’s winter shutdown.

Autocar verdict
There’s a new ride on the way at Thorpe Park early next year that promises to give Rita a run for her money, but for now we reckon she’s the most impressive roller coaster in the UK, and nothing can touch her for acceleration. Your diesel hatchback is going to feel incredibly slow on the drive home.

© Autocar