For those interested, I rode Minifigure Speedway for the first time on Sunday (9th June). I touched on the coasters themselves in both my trip report from the wider day and the "Last Cred Review" topic, but I felt I should do a longer review, delving into the coasters in more depth and also discussing aspects of the investment aside from the roller coasters themselves, as I do have some... thoughts about the non-coaster aspects that I don't think I've really touched upon yet.
Let me start with the coasters themselves.
If I were to walk through the ride(s) element by element:
- The initial drop and rush through the station is quite good fun; it's always fun getting that sense of speed as you fly back through the station on these family boomerangs!
- The curved drop out of the station is good fun, if nothing earth-shattering. You pick up some decent speed around this corner!
- The hill before/after the billboard is a definite dead spot in terms of the ride pacing, with little going on in terms of forces here, but it's definitely a fun moment of interaction between the two sides that accentuates the duelling aspect quite nicely.
- Things start to get a bit spicier after the interaction moment, with two surprisingly fun corners before the second lift hill. These pack some surprisingly decent forces for a ride of this calibre!
- After that, you go up another lift hill and negotiate the circuit again in reverse. There's little different to report about the backwards lap other than that it's fun without being too intense, and I'd cite the previously mentioned surprisingly fun corners as packing surprising forces during the backwards lap.
In terms of some other, more general aspects of the coaster experiences:
- They track very smoothly, although they perhaps have one or two marginally odd transitions here and there.
- If we're doing a like-for-like comparison between Zierer's family boomerang offering on Minifigure Speedway and Vekoma's ubiquitous competitor, I would give Vekoma's offering the edge. I think the Vekomas I've ridden feel quite flowy and dynamic in a way that the Minifigure Speedway coasters don't quite match, and the Minifigure Speedway coasters also have a general feeling of being a tad more... unrefined, for lack of a better term. These are very pedantic things, though, and I think the two are quite closely matched, in all honesty.
- Of the two sides, I would say I marginally preferred Team Legends (the blue one) to Team Allstars (the red one).
Overall, I think the coasters are pretty good fun for what they are. They're not going to blow any minds around these parts or enter any top 10 lists, but we're not the target demographic; these are family coasters aimed at young children, with a 1.05m height restriction, and I think they work really well for that demographic.
I'll now discuss some of the non-coaster aspects of the investment, as I do have some thoughts to share, both positive and negative.
In the interests of fairness, let me start with the positives...
- The theme is really good fun. The announcements from Roxy are quite a fun touch, as are things like the race lights, the little pre-show (of sorts) for each side. I also like the billboard and giant minifigure statue. The theming is quite basic, but I think that what's there works reasonably well.
- The throughput is reasonable, and a definite much-needed improvement compared to other attractions at the park. The one interval I timed returned a combined throughput of 825pph for both sides, and in general, I'd say that the average dispatch interval appeared to be around 3 minutes, which would equate to a combined two-side throughput of around 800pph. 800pph is not earth-shattering, but I think it's decent enough and a vast improvement on many other rides at Legoland. The queue seemed to move plenty fast enough compared to other rides at the park, anyhow!
With all that being said, I do also have some critiques to air...
- As was well publicised around opening, I think the landscaping and overall finish of the area by the queue and under the coasters looks poor. It looks a little less poor than it did in opening day pictures, but it still doesn't look great, and definitely still gives off a bit of a "building site" vibe, in my view. With that being said, it might look better once the planting has grown in a bit, and I accept that you won't really notice this when you're on the ride. It's mainly when you're off the ride that you notice it. I also noticed that some of the ride area fencing down by the billboard still looks quite temporary, which I'd also file under this category, but I accept that's a really pedantic one.
- This is probably going to sound very pedantic, and I apologise if it does, but I think that the design of the attraction leaves much to be desired in terms of viewpoints and interaction with those off-ride. Merlin coasters are normally quite good at considering this, but I think Minifigure Speedway's design does not give you much of a good off-ride view of the coasters from within the immediate vicinity. You can hardly see them from in the queue, with only a very brief glimpse of the tops of the lift hills being visible at the very beginning of the queue, and once you're off the ride, you're sort of underneath only a small part of the coasters, which makes things quite awkward from a photography and interaction standpoint and obscures much of the rides from spectator view. The best view you can get of the coasters is from quite far away in Duplo Valley. I concede that this could be in part due to the inherent nature of the rides being built on a hill, and this could just be me being weird, but it was just something I picked up on. Given that duelling coasters are quite good spectator pieces and often have good inherent visual appeal, I found this aspect all the more disappointing.
- Another pedantic criticism is that I'm not a fan of how the park don't let guests choose their side. Plenty of other parks with duelling coasters allow guests to pick a side without issues, and given that the queue even contains a flowchart encouraging riders to "pick their team" based on various questions, I am surprised that they don't allow people to pick. It does mean that guests may not get to experience both; I managed to experience both in only two rides, but that was through complete pot luck. Some may not be so lucky.
Overall, then, I think Minifigure Speedway is a very solid investment for Legoland. The coasters are good fun and are exactly what Legoland needed; the park really needed a more thrilling family coaster than The Dragon, in my opinion, and the Minifigure Speedway coasters fit this niche like a glove! As much as I have my critiques of some of the thematic and visual aspects, I think the theme is also good fun, and I think the attraction is overall a very fun fit for the park and deserves to do well!
Here are the photos I took of the attraction (I apologise for the lack of them and the vantage points... I feel that this kind of reinforces my critique about the ride being weak for off-ride viewing):
