We’ve had a friend from Australia stay with us, who happens to be an extremely huge Ferrari and formula 1 racing fan. So today we went with him to Ferrari World, which possibly made his day or decade. Lewis at three years is at the age where he’s really interested in cars. It was nothing though, next to someone who has watched and collected Ferrari cars for most of his life.
Being a public holiday we feared the place would be overflowing with people. We were happily wrong. The entire place was free from huge queues until well after lunch – which suited us.
I learned from my last visit, to go very early to the Formula Rosso ride – the fastest roller coaster in the world. Last time we left it until quite late in the day, and the line was estimated by the staff to take more than two hours to go through.
However long the wait, it’s probably worth it! What a mind-blowing ride. I’m used to screams when roller coasters take off. This ride was practically silent for the first 10 seconds. The 247km/hr within 2 seconds puts everyone into some exhilarating form of silent cardiac arrest. In those sorts of situations I try to tense right up. In this case, there was nothing I could do except grimace and try to recall how to breathe. The other shocking point is, most speedy rides very soon after they hit their top speed, they slow down. The Formula Rosso on the other hand explodes you from stationary to the speed of light, but keeps going. It then disproves Einstein and accelerates even faster for a few seconds longer than you think you can cope with.
I can’t recommend this ride enough. Some of the rides have a warning for people with heart conditions. I fear people wouldn’t truly know they have a heart condition until they’re on this ride. And then it’d all be too late.
My mate and I both concluded that after that ride we were happy enough to go home without seeing or doing anything further.
It wasn’t surprising, all other rides failed to live up to that experience.
We decided not to though. We did see the rest of the rides. I had been before so I didn’t need to do everything again. Instead I spent most of my time following the kids between driving various Ferrari replicas. Both boys looked way too comfortable driving Ferraris. Hopefully they get over this before they’re driving age.
In my humble opinion, the only thing which was not truly amazing in the Ferrari-sense of the word was the La Garra show. La Garra is a high energy acrobatic, roller blade, and grungy percussion thing. All the crazy kid performers were very exciting as they jumped around and pumped up the crowd, but I couldn’t help but think ‘what’s all this about?’. Ferrari to me, and the rest of the Ferrari World experience is about the prestige of one of the finest high quality, most highly sought after vehicles. The show was more high school musical meets Formula 1 pit lane.
Ferrari World is always a good day out. Or day in I should say, give it’s the world’s largest indoor theme park. But unless you have an unlimited budget, it’s not something you would want to do too often.
The boys are at the perfect age to really enjoy the place. In fact, it was a very difficult task to get Lewis out – as the final photo of the day illustrates well.