Yahoo Autos Epcot Center's Test Track Reviewed by a Nine-Year-Old
The wind blows in my face, and I'm zooming like a NASCAR driver at 65 mph. It feels real, but it's only a test, a test of Test Track, a Walt Disney World ride. You may have questions about how a ride could be as cool as a real racetrack, but by the end of this article you may have your questions answered.
My name is Benicio. I'm going into fifth grade. My grandfather worked for Chrysler as an engineer. My mom gets to write interviews and ride in cars every week, and my dad collects muscle cars. It is pretty hard to impress me, but this experience did make a pretty big impression on me.
Test Track is located at Epcot Center, a part of Disney World. When you walk into the Epcot property, there is one important thing you have to do before going on the ride. First, you have to create the car you will ride in. I know that sounds a little weird, but you head into the design lab, a room where there are little desks that have screens on them. The screens are programmed to help you create the car that you want.
First you choose what type of body you want, such as a car you see driving on the highway or a race car. There are four categories your design is rated on: power, capability, responsiveness, and efficiency. I built a sports car that looks like the Chevy Camaro, red with orange flames.
After you have completed the creation of what you want your car to look like and feel like, you head out the door to where you actually get to ride in the car on the test track. You go into the little machine that is shaped like a car that has a fairly big open cockpit, and you buckle your seatbelt. Then you will go through a dark tunnel!
While you go through the tunnel, the car shows off its different capabilities. By the way, it is a self-driving car, so it goes around automatically. The workers control when it starts and stops.
After going through the dark tunnel, you come outside. There, you go around in a circle, as if you were driving around Kansas Speedway. It is possible to go around at what feels like blinding speed. The wind feels amazing on your face on a hot day. The highest speed is 65 mph, but it feels faster. When the ride ends, you get out of the car and get the score of your car's performance. The score is based on how you did against all of the other cars that went on the Chevy Test Track. My score was 198. That is really good. Maybe you can beat it.
After I went on the Test Track I interviewed a Walt Disney imagineer, Diego Parras. Diego helped tell the story of how to make the person really get into the Test Track experience in a fun way. Diego rates the test track on a scale from zero to 10, and he thinks that it is a perfect 10. He also loves the thrill you get. Diego says, “I enjoy the sense of thrill and the sense of speed, and I love when you come out of the dark when the doors open up to the outside and then suddenly you go 65 mph.”
Diego also said that he loves to see people leaving Epcot with a gleam of fun and excitement in their eye. Diego loves cars. He owns some cars from the '70s, including a 1976 Chevelle, and he also has some cars that are from 2016. But he loves the whole process of buying and fixing cars from any time period.
When I asked him about his job, he said that an imagineer tells stories. He tries to make the person who is hearing the story believe and see what is happening in the story. They try to suck you into the character's imagination. For example, In the Disney/Pixar movie Toy Story, the boy that owned the toys was named Andy. He has a huge imagination. So if you go to Toy Story Land, the ride that came out on June 30, you come in and there are huge army men, cowboys, horses, and much more. And then you see what Andy is thinking. They want you to experience how to fly on the back of a dragon. They want you to be able to believe and have what they call a 4D experience, which is being not only able to see but also to feel what is happening. The Disney imagineers basically want you to have the 4D experience with Test Track.
To make Test Track, Diego and other imagineers came together with Chevy designers and told the story of how you design a car. They started with a base and then added different options and ideas for you. They want you to experience what it is like to design a car for Chevy and then be able to ride it in real life. The only improvement I would add would be able to add a couple of different attributes from the design lab to the actual ride, such as the exterior orange graphic flames that I created on the car I created. The car on the Test Track is straight-up blue.
But the Chevy Test Track feels like it is real life, and not some kind of roller coaster like the Brooklyn Cyclone, I guarantee it. I loved the experience of the Test Track. IT IS SO AWESOME!!!
('You Might Also Like',)
