"Oops" in Challenge Park 07/25

Right about 10:00pm, I was exiting Magnum when I noticed a large plume of smoke that appeared at my angle to be coming from Magnum's last tunnel. Then I realized that the plume was NOT coming from the tunnel, but from behind it. I jumped in line to ride again to see if I could take a look.

In Challenge Park, several men in blue shirts were clustered around one of the go-karts. Other karts were strewn haphazardly around the track, some stopped at a 90-degree angle to the expected direction of travel. By this time all customers had been removed from the Go-Karts. Across the street on Perimeter Road, a fire truck and an ambulance were standing by, but it appeared that neither had actually been needed, and in fact when I left the park a short time later, both were still parked on the road. By the time I got off of my second Magnum ride, all the karts had been returned to the station, and the track was being treated with a kitty litter equivalent in the spot where the kart of interest had been parked. There was no sign of any fire.

My guess is that one of the karts suffered a catastrophic engine failure. Furthermore it is my additional guess that someone tonight has been charged with double-checking the oil levels in all of the remaining go-karts. :)

I post this jut because I'm interested in seeing if anybody else saw what happened or has any better idea what went on. I'm pretty sure that for anybody other than us Cedar Point geeks, the incident wasn't even newsworthy!

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

I'm assuming this was the Grand Prix track? The sprint track karts seemed to be running well this year.

Wow. When I went last week, I thought the kart(red) I was driving smelled like burning oil.

I was there yesterday as well. While going up the lift on Magnum around noon I noticed them pushing a Go Kart back to the station. Maybe they were having problems with it all day.

I was there friday and all the trouble we saw was a mechanic running up to fix skyscraper, but he was walking so slow in the soak city lot, that we were stuck walking behind him and ran past him because we couldnt wait all day to get into the park.......go karts were closed most of the day, at least when we walked by there.

^^ That's a very regular occurrence, so nothing unusual there.

The track operators have a stall function we can use if go-kart drivers are being uncooperative during a red or yellow light. Sometimes, if the driver continues to accelerate while we are using the stall function, the go-kart will stall out. Some of the karts are a bitch to get restarted. This could be why some of the go-karts were being pushed back to the station.

Thanks for that answer, 4 years later...

No problem. I've been kind of busy for the past 4 years. Just getting around to checking my email.

Snap! I love it!