According to Busch Gardens Tampa, their new Cobra’s Curse coaster will use the old King Tut’s Tomb walk-through attraction to serve as the start to the ride’s air conditioned queue… something you will appreciate on those hot Florida days. While a full POV of the coaster was not released, the park did release a teaser. (See below) They also mentioned that the section of track after the elevator lift hill at the start of the ride would have the cars locked into a forward facing position, and at a certain point following this the cars would rotate 180º backwards and go up a second lift hill. When released from this second lift hill, the cars would then go into the free-spinning mode for the rest of the ride.
As you can see in the concept art, the ride will use a series of short 2-car trains, each able to hold four riders (2 rows of 2 across), and while this ride is from Mack Rides, the cars don’t appear to look like anything like the typical Mack Spinning coasters we’ve seen used elsewhere in the world. I can only imagine that perhaps this new car design might be somewhat of a hybrid between the Mack’s individual Wild Mouse cars (like Sand Serpent) mounted to the base and wheel assembly of their Spinning Coaster cars. While the park is still holding many secrets about this ride close to the vest, I was intrigued by the mention of a specific place where the cars would rotate 180º backwards before going up a second lift of some kind. Since I haven’t been able to find any trace of a second lift in the artwork released so far, I do wonder if the park may try to create some kind of theatrical event with special effects at this moment in the ride… sort of the big reveal for whatever the “curse” actually is before spinning the riders out of control for the second half of the ride. Just something to think about… but only based on pure speculation on my part.
