Tired
But once you’ve found a parking spot and you’ve gotten your Fastpass for Radiator Springs Racers out on the parade route, you might as well head right in to Cars Land and get in line for Luigi’s Flying Tires first thing, as it will have a painfully slow moving line. The Flying Tire ride had its first public test this past weekend for Cast Members, Imagineers, and their friends and family. The results were mixed.
The reports coming in from many Cast Members who attended are that the line for Luigi’s Flying Tires moves painfully slow and the queue is filled with bizarre instructions on how to get the thing to work. It hasn’t helped that John Lasseter, sensing the learning curve on making your tire move was too long for the standard 90 second ride cycle, has decreed that the ride cycle be bumped up to two minutes and 15 seconds. That makes for a better ride, but it’s also destroyed the numbers for what was already a very low capacity attraction. Interestingly, the test riders this weekend were allowed to walk right out to the middle of Cars Land for a stunning view of Radiator Springs, and they also noted that Alamo Rent-A-Car had their logos prominently displayed on the front of Luigi’s queue building as the ride’s sponsor.
Of course they know how to get it moving, they think.
The test riders at
Luigi’s Flying Tires, Presented by Alamo this past weekend reported that the ride was full of giant beach balls bouncing all over the place with Italian music blaring, and the Cast Members working the ride didn’t seem confident and were unable to keep the line moving at a decent clip. It was also reported that the Cast Members have to walk out on to the windy ride floor to manually push vehicles into the wheelchair loading area, and with all the beach balls and free floating vehicles to dodge many observers felt that process looked quite unsafe and difficult for the young Cast Members working there. Hopefully these newly trained Cast Members get more practice in during these testing days, and they’ll be speedier and more confident when the actual paying customers show up in June.
It appears the main problem with Luigi’s is that the operation of the vehicle is not at all easy to figure out, and WDI has now filled the queue with instructions on how to get the floating tires to move. For last weekend’s test the walls of the queue were plastered with giant billboards offering rider instructions that only seemed to get more confusing as you shuffled slowly further into the queue. When the Luigi’s Cast Members were asked by test riders to explain the “Flying Tips”, their answer was simply “Just lean and it will move”. But the official rider instructions for Luigi’s Flying Tires, devoid of any pictures or graphics, were as follows this past weekend as provided by those who test rode;
Luigi’s Flying Tip #1 – Balance Point
Once airborne, find your BALANCE POINT,
shift your weight from side to side and
front to back so you are floating freely
and no part of your tire touches the floor.
(Easy enough, right?)
Luigi’s Flying Tip #2 – Lean
Once you have found your balancing point,
LEAN slightly in the direction you would like to fly.
If you lean too far your tire will dip and skid on the floor.
If you are flying with others coordinate your
BALANCING and LEANING together!
(I’m confused.
What’s the difference between
leaning and shifting?)
Play ball!
Luigi’s Flying Tip #3 – Spin
Recommended for advanced tire flyers.
To SPIN the tire simply move the control handle
to the left or right and hold in that position.
The tire will slowly start to spin
and will gradually increase in speed.
(Except the spin control doesn’t work and only frustrates
anyone who wastes 2 minutes and 15 seconds trying.)
Luigi’s Flying Tip #4 - Lean & Spin
Recommended for advanced tire flyers.
It takes more skill to SPIN & TRAVEL in a
desired direction at the same time.
To do so, choose a direction you wish to go
and continuously change your LEAN towards
that direction while your tire rotates beneath you.
(Huh? And exactly how am I supposed to become
an advanced tire flyer when the line is two hours long
and I keep getting smacked around by beach balls?)
Needless to say, the first big test of Luigi’s Flying Tires left a lot of folks scratching their heads and wondering if it was just them, or if their tire was broken. It’s not you, it’s not your tire, it’s that the ride is very complicated and takes at least several times before you get the hang of it. There’s a second test planned for Saturday, May 5th when thousands more Cast Members, Imagineers and their friends and family will be invited in to Cars Land to fly the tires again. It will be interesting to see what changes WDI has made to the ride by then, and if it helps any.
The good news is that several hundred front-line Cast Members have ridden Luigi’s Flying Tires last month as part of earlier testing, and they all report that their skill got much better on about the third ride and they really had a lot of fun by the fifth or sixth ride. But with a very low hourly capacity as witnessed by the painfully slow moving line this past weekend, it could take up half your day getting to your third or fourth ride on Luigi’s Flying Tires in order to achieve the Advanced Beginner stage. Forget ever becoming an “Advanced Flyer”, there aren’t enough Sudoku puzzles in the world to work on as you wait in that slow line over and over again to get to that mythical skill level.