The History of Safety and Design in Motor Sport

Safety and Design in Motor Sport

Motor racing is often considered to be the most 'dangerous' sport. Certainly it is one of the only sports where the act of competing is inherently risky. The forces involved are only briefly approached by other popular sports - a few baseball players have been killed by 'fastballs', footballers get broken legs from tackles, cricketers wear helmets when batting against fast bowlers. Activities like skiing, horse riding and cycling are potentially very dangerous, although this is more because of the amount of amateur competitions going on - at the highest levels of competition there are rarely deaths. But the truth is that there are rarely fatalities in motor racing much these days - the sport is light years ahead of where it once was in terms of protecting it's competitors. In fact it has reached a stage where drivers can quip that they are probably at more risk driving to the races on the public road than they are on the track.

For all that motor racing has a deserved reputation for once having been lethally dangerous that does not mean that the people involved were not concerned with safety. In fact safety in motor sport goes right back to the earliest days. In 1903 the epic Paris to Madrid race was stopped short of the finish after several shocking crashes that left five competitors and three spectators dead. One crash occurred when a car swerved to avoid a boy running into the road and killed a policeman, another claimed the famous driver Marcel Renault (one of the founders of the eponymous car company) who overturned and was killed. The public outcry was considerable, newspapers were divided on whether to support the burgeoning motor racing events, and politicians who had supported the race were asked to explain themselves and whether they had tried hard enough to ensure safety.

So safety was not far from people minds even when drivers and their riding mechanics sat in giant wooden cars, with a huge petrol tank behind their heads, with skinny tyres made from solid blocks of rubber, and drove as fast as they could down dusty unpaved roads, inches from ditches and trees. The problem was that the technology simply didn't exist to make things any safer. Cars were huge and ungainly because they couldn't be made any smaller, and the only way for engineers to increase power from engines was to make them bigger. The bigger the cylinder capacity the greater the horsepower, and soon engines designed for use on aeroplanes were being shoehorned into cars. These monsters could get up to 100mph in a straight line, but still ran on wooden horse cart wheels. The potential for disasters was inherent and the only way to reduce risk was for the car to develop into a more sophisticated machine.

Most early European races were on public roads, either between cities or in large circuits around the countryside. The only place in the continent where this didn't apply was in Britain. The government of Edwardian Britain did not approve of the continental habit of road racing at all. Ever since the earliest days of cars the speed limit had been set at 20mph and road racing had been outlawed. The only exception, thanks the curiosities of the British parliamentary system, was on the Isle of Man, where the independent government decided to buck the trend and allow racing on it's roads (and also to not have a speed limit). Over one hundred years later the Isle of Man TT motorcycle races remain both some of the most dangerous races in the world, and by far the island's main source of tourist income - thus proving that both sets of policy makers had a valid point of view.

With the public roads out of bounds Britain's wannabe car racers either had to travel across the channel to France - the racing hotbed - or had to try something different; build their own road. In 1907 the wealthy Surrey landowner Huge Locke-King (with the assistance of some of Mrs. Locke-King's family money) built a giant racing track on his land at Brooklands, near Weybridge, south of London. Brooklands was an enormous undertaking; it was 2.75 miles around the track, the two banked turns were thirty foot high, and there was space for 200,000 spectators in the infield grounds (which also contained an airfield) Brooklands wasn't just about hosting races - it was also intended to provide a high speed testing facility for Britains many motor companies. As asphalt was still expensive and complicated to lay concrete was used for the surface. This meant that over the years Brooklands became a rather bumpy ride, but still the huge oval track became a Mecca for the British car industry and the British could finally keep up with the French and Germans and host a Grand Prix.

Although the occasional horse racing dirt track had been used before for motor racing (the Milwaukee Mile in Wisconsin has the distinction of being the world's oldest motor racing course), Brooklands was the first purpose-built racing track. It was such a brave new world that the first races were based on the protocols of horse racing; drivers wore coloured silks and cars lined up wheel to wheel on the start line rather than behind each other on the grid that would become familiar in later years. Brooklands successful operation, and the profits created by charging spectators for admission and car makers for use of the track inspired entrepreneurs in other countries to follow suit. In the small American city of Indianapolis local businessman Carl Fisher, who had made a fortune with his car dealerships and parts businesses, built the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 1909. Like Brooklands it was 2.5 miles round, had banked turns, space for a huge crowd, and was intended for racing and car testing.

After making losses on several racing events throughout the year Fisher decided to host one big race, over five hundred miles, and with a huge prize fund - the Indianapolis "500", as it was almost immediately known. In Italy the Monza Autodromo in Milan was built to a similar template a decade later, and the French built a course at Monthlery south of Paris. Road racing events would continue, albeit never quite on the epic scale of the city to city races, but closed circuits helped make motor racing a more legitimate sport. Spectator safety was more manageable, people no longer crowded around at the edges of the roads. Circuit owners could rake in enough money to pay racers large prize funds - less reliance was placed on newspapers and other sponsors to come in an pay the costs of hosting races. Races could be organised for different classes of car, drivers could be tested and licensed for competence, and all cars were inspected for defects and road-worthiness.

Driver deaths still occurred, but this was a world where deaths in general were a much more frequent occurance. Many great drivers of the earliest days died in action in the Great War, others then died in the great flu epidemic of 1918. The great British driver Tim Birkin died not in a crash but of blood poisoning after burning his arm on his car's hot exhaust. Drivers were seen as heroic daredevils, honorable men (and often women, for racing authorities were often surprisingly liberal compared to the attitudes of their times in allowing women to race, although often the women were aristocrats and had far more power and money than the racing organisers) who upheld the pride of their countries. In Britain drivers such as Malcolm Campbell and Henry Segrave were knighted for setting speed records.

For half a century the attitude most drivers had to crashes was to be thrown clear. Much like a modern motorcyclist or horse rider the drivers sat more on their cars than in them. Perched high up and completely exposed drivers would drive far more in their comfort zone than todays racers. Drivers rarely pushed to 100% in a race for the sake of self-preservation. On the skinny tyres of the day the driver had far more input to how the car would handle in a corner as opposed to todays drivers who have the luxury of almost unlimited grip and who usually turn in and hang on. Plus the cars were far less reliable, even relative sprint races like the Grand Prix's drivers had to drive to take care of their car, to avoid breaking down. Some drivers gained a reputation for taking reckless risks - the great 1930s driver Tazio Nuvolari in particular was often jokingly rumoured to have a pact with the devil, Others were more considered - today the 1950s Grand Prix driver Tony Brooks recalls how he nearly always drove within his limits and refused to push to make up the deficits on an inferior car. In 1958 Brooks raced against two drivers - Luigi Musso and Peter Collins who both died in crashes when they seemed to push too hard - Musso running off the road in Reims, and Collins overturning and hitting a tree at the Nurburgring. Not all drivers were 'gentlemanly' and sporting either, despite the obvious risks involved in car to car contact - the first world champion Giuseppe Farina was known as a blocker.

As in the earliest days the safety of spectators during the years after the Second World War took priority over the drivers. British circuits would remind the spectators that the earth bank - solid and potentially deadly for the drivers - were there for their protection and to not climb on them. This laissez-faire attitude to spectator safety would come to a sudden halt a Le Mans in 1955. Le Mans had begun in 1923 as a twenty four hour challenge on the public roads. Earliest races were more like motor rallies than high speed races, but by the 1950s the cars were capable of 150mph+ on the long straights. For 1955 the race had become a globally prestigious race where car manufactures were no longer sending modified road cars but sent exotic purpose built race cars. The circuit itself had barely changed. the start line was two lanes wide, the the pit lane a marked off area at the side of the road. across the road the grandstands where the spectators would crowd in for the opening and closing hours of the race were protected by an earth bank. three hours into the race disaster struck; Mike Hawthorn headed his leading Jaguar into the pit, behind him the slower Healey of Lance Macklin seemed surprised by Hawthorn suddenly slowing and swerved left to avoid him. right behind Macklin was the Mercedes of Pierre Levegh who had no time to react before crashing into the back of the Healey. The Mercedes flew into the air, over the bank and broke apart.

The car's engine and suspension flew through the spectator enclosure and killed over eighty people - including driver Levegh. The fall out from the disaster was considerable - several grand prixs were cancelled, leading to a short calendar of seven races. Racing was banned permanently in switzerland, ending the Swiss Grand Prix, Mercedes-Benz would withdraw from racing at the end of the year and would not return until the late 1980s. 1955 also saw additional tragedies elsewhere - double world champion Alberto Ascari died in a crash testing at Monza, double Indy 500 winner Bill Vukovich died in a crash during the 1955 "500" race. The American Automobile Assocation - the organiser of Indy - would cease all racing activities at the end of the year, handing over to a group created by the Indianapolis Speed; United States Auto Club (USAC). Two years later the great round-Italy road race the Mille Miglia would end when Alfonso de Portago's Ferrari crashed into a crowd killing spectators and the driver. Such was the outcry even the Vatican got involved - the Pope condemning Enzo Ferrari for sending many young men to their deaths in his cars.

The great road races were dying off - the RAC Tourist Trophy left Dundrod in Ulster after a disastrous race, again in 1955, with two drivers killed. Pescara in Italy, Porto and Monsanto Park in Portugal, Pedralbes in Spain, all faded away from the international stage in the 1960s. The 37-mile circuit of the Targa Florio in Sicily survived until 1973 until it became a rally event. Racing increasingly becoming closed circuit racing. This would suit the British racing teams. Ironically the British government's outlawing of road racing had created the environment for British designers to flourish. Brooklands had closed after being converted into a airfield for bomber manufacturing during the war and never reopened. Since they still couldn't race on public roads in England, Scotland, and Wales, British racers took to the many airfields built for the war that dotted the landscape and developed lightweight racers. As major racing migrated away from open roads - with their cobble stones, tramlines and other rough surfaces, the British cars began to run rings around the opposition from Europe and eventually America too.

Ferrari and Maserati had to make space for Cooper, Lotus, BRM and then Mclaren, Brabham, Tyrrell, March and Williams. The key development was placing the car's engine behind the driver rather than in front as in a conventional car. Rear-engined cars had been tried in the 1930s; the fearsome Auto Unions developed by Dr. Ferdinand Porsche (later to create his own company) pioneered the idea, and the innovative American engineer Harry Miller tried a similar idea at Indianapolis, but the cars were too heavy and ungainly for any advantages to be noticed. What the British designers did, with the luxury of super-smooth and spacious airfield racetracks was, in the memorable catchphrase of Lotus's genius engineer Colin Chapman, to 'Simplify and add lightness'. The lightweight Cooper's and Lotuses may have been developed in small lock up garages (by the 'garagistes' as Enzo Ferrari sniffily called them) but they were nimble, quick to accelerate, didn't wear out their tyres, and didn't need a driveshaft between the engine and gearbox - both were next to each other in the back of the car, so the driver could sit low, almost on the ground. Soon even Ferrari had to admit that the future was with the engine behind the driver and abandoned his beloved front-engined cars. Over in America the home grown front-engined 'Roadster' cars that raced in the Indy 500 were blown away in 1965 by a Grand Prix Lotus. The Indy cars would soon become close cousins of Formula One machines.

The newer rear engined cars were undoubtedly more sophisticated than their predecessors but were also quicker and once again the circuits were not keeping up with the cars. The 1961 Italian Grand Prix saw a crash that killed Ferrari driver Wolfgang von Trips and fourteen spectators standing protected by only a bank and a wire fence. The next year the great Stirling Moss's career ended in the crumpled wreck of a Lotus at Goodwood. The new cars were often flimsy as designers realised the benefits of lighter weight for handling, a practice that did not endear them to drivers. Moss had broken his legs and back in a crash in 1960 when a wheel had fallen off his Lotus. At his next birthday party he was presented with a cake in the shape of his Grand Prix car. After blowing his candles out he promptly sliced the car's front wheel off and presented it to Colin Chapman. Fuel tanks were fitted on the sides of the driver's cockpit, often actually moulded into the seat - the driver effectively sitting surrounded by a bath of gasoline. The early stages of the 1964 Indy 500 showed the terrible consequences of these designs. One driver (Dave MacDonald) spun into the inside wall, his car instantly exploding in a fireball, a second driver (Eddie Sachs) plowed broadside into the wreck, his car also exploding. Both drivers died.

Fire had been an ever present danger since the beginning of motor racing. All cars had to carry large tanks of volatile gasoline which all too frequently caught fire in a crash. In the 1960s some basic measures to prevent this problem began to be introduced; rubber fuel bladders developed for military aircraft began to be fitted inside fuel tanks to prevent disastrous ruptures of the tanks. drivers also began to forsake cotton shirts for fire-resistant suits. this measure occasionally helped some drivers escape but just as frequently was a futile gesture as drivers asphyxiated underneath upturned burning cars. USAC racing had realised the inherent danger of gasoline and had specified all their cars used less volatile alcohol fuels, Grand Prix racing and NASCAR stuck with gasoline, often with appalling consequences for drivers. At the 1967 Monaco Grand Prix Lorenzo Bandini crashed his Ferrari out of second place late in the race, overturned and was trapped under a burning car. He was eventually dragged free but died in hospital three days later. In the 1968 french driver Jo Schlesser crashed and overturned in a similar manner; his car had a magnesium chassis and the fire marshalls extinguisher's were useless to fight the fire, in fact the chemical reaction between the magnesium and the oxygen in the water actually worsened the situation.

In the late 1960s racing cars began a quantum leap in performance levels that would see cornering speeds leap upwards and racing become about as dangerous as it had ever been. One of the reasons for the performance increase was larger tyres with more grip, but the main one was aerodynamic downforce generated by aerofoils and other devices. The wings on the cars worked the opposite to aeroplane wings - using the air to push the car down to the track. But while the cars were getting faster and faster the tracks were lacking in basic safety features.

The world of motor racing was shocked to it's core in April 1968 when double world champion Jim Clark - undisputed the most naturally gifted driver of his time - died in a crash at the Hockenheim track in Germany. at high speed one of Clark's tyres had punctured and he had spun off the track into trees. there was no barrier or fence between the road and the forest and Clark's car struck one broadside. even drivers hardened to the death of fellows were shaken - for one Clark was undoubtedly the best driver, secondly he was renowned as a driver not prone to recklessness, and third he had died in a minor formula two race, rather than a grand prix. Clark's death was a sobering reminder that death could claim any driver no matter how skilled and at any moment.

Even before Clark's death one of his contemporaries had become quietly resolved to make racing safer - or at least to remove some of it's more needless dangers. At the 1966 Belgian Grand Prix Jackie Stewart - Clark's fellow Scot and protege - crashed in a rain storm. Spa was one of the remaining open road circuits, a high speed eight mile blast around Ardennes countryside between farmhouses, trees and even fields fenced with barbed wire. Stewart spun off the road into a barn and was trapped in his car as it's ruptured fuel tanks gradually leaked fuel into the cockpit. Stewart was freed by two fellow drivers who unbolted his steering wheel and tore away crushed bodywork. as he sat in the rudimentary medical centre contemplating the many stubbed out cigarette ends on the floor Stewart become resolved to make safety a higher priority in the future.

Jackie Stewart began pushing for better facilities at tracks. he advocated a mobile hospital with emergency blood supplies and trauma facilities. he also lobbied for circuits to become safer and remove the the more obvious dangers - telegraph posts, stands of trees, hay bales and other hazards. Stewart's efforts, much lauded today, met with much opposition in the 1960s. For one he was resented by many of the older generation most of whom had seen first hand to horrors of the second world war, and disliked the idea of a young upstart telling them that racing should be subject to rafts of new regulations. For this generation the dangers of racing were almost irrelevant compared to the threats that had been presented to the world during wartime. Secondly improvements to safety would cost money without any obvious financial benefit, most circuit owners were unwilling to commit and there was no commercial pressure to bring them into line as there would come to be in later decades.

In the early 1970s attitudes gradually began to change as the tragedies mounted up; the 1970 world championship was awarded posthumously to Jochen Rindt (killed in a crash at the Italian Grand Prix), Bruce Mclaren, Piers Courage, Jo Siffert, Pedro Rodriguez, Francois Cevert, Peter Revson... top line drivers kept dying in crashes. perhaps the most appalling incident occured at the 1973 Dutch Grand rix. newcomer Roger Williamson crashed and overturned his car when his car's suspension failed. His car caught alight while several marshalls stood by and watched impotently. Another driver, David Purley, who had seen the crash, ran to help turn the car over. As the fire began to rage Purley could hear Williamson call urgently for him to turn the car over. Purley desperately implored the marshalls to join him but they refused, unable to come closer to the burning car in ordinary clothes, and lacking fire extinguishers. By the time the track's fire truck finally arrived at the scene Williamson had axphysiated in his seat. A needless and wasteful tragedy captured for the world by the Dutch TV cameras.

The influence of television and commercial sponsorship likely had an effect on attitudes to safety. Until the 1970s motor races were seldom broadcast on television and deadly crashes rarely seen outside of newsreels. Household names like clark were mourned but viewers did not see them perish live on tv. Similarly as racing cars came to be plastered with corporate logos the drivers became ever more important to the sponsors, and television viewers became more important to those running the sport. By the end of the 1970s all forms of racing were gradually appearing on television, and more and more sponsors from different arenas were appearing on cars. Formula One was coming under the influence of the manager of the Brabham team Bernie Ecclestone who was managing the commercial interests of the sport and brokering deals with circuit owners and television companies. In 1978 Ecclestone was also calling up doctors to consult on safety at the races.

The man Ecclestone chose to be Formula One's medical boss was a world renowned neurosurgeon from the London Hospital; Professor Sid Watkins. Watkins, a life long racing enthusiast, and former track doctor at the American Watkins Glen track, began work on improving the medical facilities at Formula One tracks. Some were improvements on existing facilities; many tracks had medical centres but the quality was extremely variable. Some had emergency ambulances and helicopters, and some did not. Watkins's with Ecclestone's influence had the power to enforce some of the changes. At the 1978 Italian Grand Prix their concerns were realised. At the race's start a multiple crash sent the Lotus of Ronnie Peterson heavily into the barriers. Peterson was dragged out of the wreck by several fellow drivers, both his legs were broken but he was otherwise uninjured. It took several minutes for an ambulance to arrive at the scene and it then had to negotiate a police cordon set up around the accident. Peterson was taken to a nearby hospital where he was stabilized and doctors planned to operate on his legs. During the subsequent operation Peterson developed mulitple fat emboli in his blood stream, slipped into a coma and died. The shambolic rescue and treatment of Peterson, and his death after what should have been survivable injuries, solidified the resolve of Watkins and Ecclestone to improve the medical facilities in Formula One. Medical helicopters, track medical centres, a medical car staffed with an emergency response team, training for marshalls in extricating drivers from their car; all quickly became features of F1 racing in the 1980s.

Formula One wasn't the only arena where safety was being improved. Over in America the USAC and NASCAR series were increasing safety features. The 1973 had been a disastrous affair - 2 drivers died and another was injured in a crash that sprayed burning methanol fuel into the crowd, causing further minor injuries. The second driver death - that of David 'Swede' Savage showed how much safety had improved since the deadly inferno in the 1964 race, and how much further it had to go. Savage spun off the fourth turn of the speedway straight into the same wall that the ill-fated Dave MacDonald had hit in 1964. Like MacDonald his car exploded into pieces, but Savage's fire suit protected him from the worst of the inferno and the fire fighters quickly put out the fire. Unfortunately one of the fire trucks, driving the wrong direction down the pitlane, hit and killed a mechanic. Savage survived in hospital for a month but then died from renal failure, allegedly due to a contaminated blood transfusion. Like Peterson, Savage was as much a victim of inadequate medical care as the dangers of the track.

After 1973 Indianapolis became a safer place - the giant wings on the cars were clipped, turbo charger boost levels were limited, and fuel tanks reduced in size. Such limitations on performance in the name of safety were not exactly unprecedented - the giant aero engined monsters of racing in the 1910s were legislated away by maximum engine displacement rules in the 1920s - but such sweeping changes to many different aspects of car design was a sign that safety was becoming increasingly important. In NASCAR the 'stock' part of stock car racing had already been disappearing partly due to safety - roll cages, tyre inner liners, fire extinguishers, and window nettings all appeared over the years. In 1969 Ford and General Motors tried a new trick; selling limited edition aerodynamic cars for the road so they could race them in NASCAR. After two years of ever increasing speed records NASCAR changed the rules to outlaw the aero-specials.

In the 1980s the motor governing body, the FIA, took the opposite approach when trying to promote the World Rally Championship. Rallying had been gaining popularity in the 1970s, developing from a slower-paced amateur affair with lightly modified road cars, to events with many high speed 'Special Stages' and faster performance cars. The problem for the FIA was that some car manufacturers' road cars were far more suited to high speed off and on-road driving than others, as demonstrated when Audi's four-wheel drive Quattro car cleaned up in the early 1980s. They developed a similar idea to what the manufacturers had tried in NASCAR; to allow entries from custom built specials except without needing road-car equivalents.

The 'Group B' (Group A was for road cars) idea was popular with manufacturers who flocked in to build their own rally cars. Spectators also flocked in the watch the new breed of "Super cars", but soon the Group B rallies were getting out of hand. Freed from the need to build road cars the car makers  poured money into absurdly powerful and fast cars that the driver's could barely handle. And the roads they raced down were often packed tight with huge crowds of spectators - just as the great city to city motor races had once been  At the 1986 Portuguese Rally one driver lost control of his Ford RS200 and plunged into the packed crowd, killing three. A few months later Lancia team leader Henri Toivonen and his co-driver Sergio Cresto died in a fireball when their car plunged into a ravine in Corsica and exploded. The FIA changed their mind about the free-for-all designs and reverted back to road-based cars for 1987, a formula that top level rallying has retained ever since. Unwilling to abandon their Group B cars, many manufacturers took them elsewhere and gave sudden boosts of professionalism and performance to lesser-known events like the Dakar Rally and the Pikes Peak hillclimb, thus paving the way for the further development of other types of off road rallying.

The balance between motor sports being a proving ground for manufacturers and designers versus an entertainment was shifting towards the latter in the 1970s. The late 1960s had seen a raft of innovations - moving wings, turbine engines, 'fan cars' using vacuum suction to grip the road, being introduced by innovative designers and then rapidly restricted by the powers in charge. The dramatic Can-Am series in America had been born in the late 1960s with a very open rulebook - effectively entrants could compete with just about anything they chose - and attracted the cream of sports car companies (Ferrari, McLaren, Porsche) but after a few years internal politics led to increasing restrictions on designers and the series died in 1975 as all manufacturers had withdrawn. From then on racing would adhere to this pattern - manufacturers would occasionally enter as competitors to win a few prize races (Indy, Le Mans etc) and then leave when their objectives were met but the bulk of entrants in all series were privateer teams funded by corporate sponsors, and affiliated with car makers to provide engines and design expertise.

These teams would become legendary names in the latter half of the twentieth century - Ferrari, McLaren and Williams in F1; Penske in Indycar; Roush, Childress, Hendrick in NASCAR; ProDrive in rallying All were tiny operations compared to the car makers - they worked out of industrial estates in specialised workshops developing their latest innovations in high secrecy. Even in the technologically isolated world of NASCAR 'stock' car racing - where strict rules kept cars for using many innovations, where the cars still used carburettors and didn't have fuel gauges, the high-tech 'superteams' would still use the latest technology in their workshops to give their cars an edge that would crush the opposition and attract blue chip corporate sponsors.

In the late 1970s two revolutionary innovations in racing car design would come out of the cottage industry of racing designers and their collaborations with the wider world of industry. In the middle of the decade the Lotus F1 team had been experimenting with the idea of a 'wing car' - rather than simply having wings bolted onto the car, making the entire shape of the car into a downforce-creating wing shape. To test their idea they took models to aerospace windtunnels originally intended to test airliners and fighter jets. While experimenting with shapes the Lotus team noticed that placing large sliding 'skirts' down the sides of the car created a huge amount of low pressure under the car. This was a vacuum effect without any the moving fans that had been outlawed. The Lotus 78 with it's sliding skirts could corner must faster than it's rivals and the improved Lotus 79 was dominant - "painted to the road" in the words of it's driver Mario Andretti - from now on the shape of the racing car would be formed in a wind tunnel.

The concept of so-called 'ground effect' quickly spread to all forms of racing - via the Chaparral in Indycar, the Porsche 956 in sportscars, and even to NASCAR where cars gradually evolved small splitters and valances on their noses and tails. The potency of the ground effect was enhanced by the other great innovation of the time - carbon composites. Woven carbon fibre composites promised a great improvement over aluminium, steel and magnesium - the traditional materials of racing car construction. Carbon was stronger, stiffer, and, crucially, lighter than aluminium. The importance of rigidity and stiffness and the new world of highly aerodynamic racing cars had been highlighted by the speed that the Lotus 79 had suddenly been overtaken by the competition after one year, especially the Williams team, who created similar cars with stronger chassis that didn't flex and were thus more efficient.

The effect of safety of the ground effect revolution was a double edged sword. In the Lotus 78 and 79 the need to create clear 'tunnels' down the cars flanks meant the fuel tanks could no longer be beside the driver. The Lotus placed the fuel tank in a much more protected position behind the driver and in front of the engine. The large side-pods also created crushable bodywork to absorb impacts and cushion the driver. On the flip side the cars were hugely fast in the corners, once again straining the safety facilities of circuits, and had a disturbing tendency to fly when launched over another car. The large undersides of the cars creating a perfect surface to catch the oncoming air and flip the cars over.

As the ground effect cars increased in performance they pushed the limits of the materials used to construct the cars - parts would fail under strain and the resulting crashes involved very large forces. In 1980 F1 driver Patrick Depailler died in testing at Hockenheim when his suspension collapsed under the stresses of high speed cornering. Two years later the mercurial crowd favourite Gilles Villeneuve crashed into the back of another car in a qualifying session; his Ferrari somersaulted high into the air, over the barrier and disintegrated. A month later at the Indianapolis 500 qualifications driver Gordon Smiley died when he crashed head-on into the Speedway's turn three wall at 200mph. Smiley's crash was a 'ground effect' crash; he lost the back end of his car in the corner, as his car slid it lost the downforce from the ground effect tunnels under the car. Smiley instinctively counter-steered to correct his car and in doing do his car suddenly regained it's downforce, snapped back straight and was now facing the concrete wall without losing any speed. Smiley had no further time to react - his car was totally destroyed in the crash.  

Aluminium chassis could clearly not withstand an impact at the kind of speeds the cars of the 1980s were capable of travelling. A year earlier from the tragedies of 1982 came a clue to the potential of carbon fibre to be more crash proof than aluminium. The 1981 McLaren F1 car did not win any championships but it was - in a subtle way - one of the most important racing cars ever created. The McLaren MP4 was the first racing car with a chassis made entirely from carbon composites. The chassis - developed in collaboration with Hercules Aerospace - attracted both praise and suspicion in equal amounts. It was undoubtedly an elegant piece of minimal design but doubters wondered if composites were too brittle to be crash resistant, and whether the car would crumble in a cloud of black debris when crashed.

In the 1981 Italian Grand Prix the McLaren MP4 was put to the crash test when John Watson spun in one the high speed turns on the Monza circuit. Watson spun hard into the crash barrier and richocheted back across the road. The car's engine and rear wheels broke away and bounced down the track, but the driver's cockpit completely intact and Watson could even step out and walk away. The toughness of carbon chassis was conclusively proven and during the next decade the material would cocoon drivers from once previously lethal impacts. Suddenly Formula One and Indy drivers were no longer dying in high speed crashes.

Circuits were becoming safer too in the 1980s. After Jackie Stewart's initial safety crusade had threatened some circuits to modernise or lose their races there began a blitz of installing metal barriers round tracks in the 1970s. This approach was then tempered by the deaths of some drivers (and maiming of others) by improperly secured barriers, and barriers that were much stronger than the cars that hit them. As previously mentioned the car Roger Williamson perished in had been flipped over by a crash barrier mounted in sandy soil rather than a solid foundation - the barrier bent over when hit and flipped Williamson's car over.

Later in the same year Stewart's protege, Francois Cevert was killed in an impact with a barrier at Watkins Glen (the last race of the year, causing Stewart to withdraw from what was scheduled to be his final race before retiring). Cevert ran wide in the circuit's uphill 'S'-bends, brushed barriers on one side of the track, went off line and crashed heavily into the other side before sliding sideways back across track again broadside into the first barrier. Cevert was killed instantly - both car and driver sliced in two by the heavy metal rail - ironically all on part of the circuit that had once been entirely open to the fields; had Cevert made his slight mistake a few years prior he would have likely spun harmlessly through rough grass, albeit possibly scattering the photographers and marshalls who were once prevalant at the edge of the road at motor races.

The Glen would see another gruesome crash a year later at the Grand Prix - Austrian rookie Helmuth Koinigg ran straight into a two-tier guard rail after his brakes failed. The lower rail gave way in the crash while the top held firm, Koinigg's car slid underneath the top rail and the driver was decapitated. A year later in Barcelona the Spanish Grand Prix was nearly cancelled after drivers inspected the Montjuic street track and found many badly fitted and often unbolted barriers. The race went ahead only for several spectators (standing in a prohibited area) to be killed when a car crashed over the barriers.

A solution to the crash barrier problem seemed to come in the form of catch fencing - walls of mesh held up with light wooden posts installed in protective layers in front of the railings. The idea undoubtedly arrested cars and prevented impacts, and since drivers now all wore full-faced crash helmets (instead of helmets and goggles) there was less danger of any wounds from the fences. However tangled fences could often prevent drivers getting out their cars - and help reaching the drivers - and the posts sometimes struck dangerous blows to driver's heads. Catch fences began to be phased out in the 1980s in favour of gravel and sand traps. These areas gravel on the edges of corners would also slow cars down but without the potential dangers of fencing but retaining the penalty-factor of bogging cars down and often putting them out of the race. Solid barriers also began to to be fronted with layers of tyres to soften impacts - harking back to the days of straw bales but without the same potential for fuelling deadly blazes.

By the late 1980s all racing series were developing a sense of relative safety- the days when it was practically a guarantee that at least one driver would be killed during the year and a big name star would be killed every few years were seemingly passed. Cars were stronger, circuits were less hazardous, emergency responses to crashes were vastly improved, medical care and firefighting especially showing a vast improvement over past decades. One challenging and intimidating corner at one race track in particular seemed to bear witness to the improvements.

The Tamburello turn at the Imola circuit in northern Italy was renowed as one of the most breathtaking, heart-in-mouth, places on the world racing calendar. A flat out left hand bend taken by F1 cars at close to 200mph, with a narrow strip of concrete and grass to the right before a looming concrete wall protecting a river behind. In the late 1980s and early 1990s several F1 drivers crashed heavily at Tamburello and walked away. Nelson Piquet and Michele Alboreto spun into the concrete wall at full speed during practice session crashes while Gerhard Berger ran head-on into it after a car failure during the early stages of the 1989 San Marino Grand Prix. Berger's crash looked disastrous to the watching television viewers.

His Ferrari didn't turn the corner after breaking it's front wing, ran straight into the wall and exploded in flames. But where once there might have a been a tragic scene of inept and inexperienced marshalls there was instead a scene of consummate professonalism. An emergency response car pulled up to the wreck and fire marshalls quelled the blaze. Then the medical car arrived with Professor Watkin's and his team of doctors and paramedics to extricate and stabilise the driver. Berger had minor burns to his hands and face but was otherwise unharmed, protected from serious injury by his multi-layered fire-suit and his Ferrari's carbon fibre 'tub' chassis.

Other forms of racing too were seeing similar situations, and racing organisations were seeing their levels of safety as badges of pride. In America NASCAR had long considered it's cars with their heavy roll cages as some of the safest race cars in the world - a point often proven with high speed shunts at Daytona, Talladega and the like where drivers  would clamber from the cars  shaken but mostly unhurt. The NHRA drag racing organisation had pioneered it's so called 'safety safari' in the 1950s where it's fire fighters and emergency extrication crews would travel around America to amateur drag strips and competitions training locals how to rescue drivers from crashed cars. The Safari operated impressively during the pro-races, usually their reponse trucks would be seen rolling towards a crash before the wreck had even finished.

All of this is by way of illustrating the general sense of security that had been generated around big-time motor racing, and the consquent seismic shockwaves that were created on May 1st 1994 when Ayrton Senna - the three time Formula One World Champion - crashed out of the lead in the San Marino Grand Prix at Tamburello corners and died. The motor racing world had not known a situation of such shock and disbelief since the death of Jim Clark in 1968. In both cases the two drivers had such abundant talents, had scored so many successes, and been such dominant figures in their respective eras that it seemed inconcievable that they might be killed in racing cars. And if Clark had seemed to have too calm and sensible a demeanour to ever seem to be risking a dice with death then Senna had cultivated an image as a driver with such determined focus and motivation as to have an almost spiritual understanding and control of his car. Senna, like Clark was simply too good at what he did to die.

The day before Senna died another driver - the rookie Roland Ratzenberger - was killed at the same track. Ratzenberger's death brought to an end the twelve year run that Formula One had enjoyed without a fatality at a race weekend. Six years had elapsed since driver Elio de Angeles had died in after a crash in a testing session, a crash that had eerie echoes of Roger Williamson's death in 1973. De Angeles had overturned his car in a high speed corner and over twenty minutes elapsed before the few onlookers at the track managed to rescue the driver who was unconscious and unresponsive. While safety at races had been improved, test sessions were still very unpredictable. Because it happened away from the television cameras in a private test session de Angeles's demise tended to be overlooked whenever safety in F1 was mentioned. Riccardo Paletti's fatal crash into the back of Didier Pironi's stalled Ferrari on the starting line in Montreal 1982 was usually remembered as the "last fatality".

Ratzenberger's crash happened at the highest speed point of the Imola circuit and was apparently down to a car failure. The F1 paddock was saddened but not shocked. The rookie had evidently damaged his car's front wing against a kerb and not pulled into the pits to have it checked. When it fell off it fell under the car's front wheels, jammed them and the driver slid straight off into the concrete barrier. One person who was shocked by the fatality was Ayrton Senna - in the aftermath he commandeered a course car and drove up the track to look at the scene. He confided to Dr Watkin's that he didn't think he should race in the upcoming grand prix. In the aftermath of his own death much was made of Senna's seeming premonition of his own end, how his normally unflappable demeanour had been shaken, how like Niki Lauda before his near-fatal Nurburgring crash in 1976 Senna suddenly was preoccupied with safety.

As it was Senna lined up for the 1994 San Marino grand prix on the morning of May 1 1994 in pole position, and at the starting light leapt away into the lead as he had countless times before, with the young German upstart Michael Schumacher in hot pursuit. Schumacher had won the first two races of the year, while Senna had failed to finish in either, a major upset of pre-season predictions that had Senna, finally behind the wheel of the dominant Williams Renault, romping away with the championship. So Senna was keen to press on in the race, to finally put the new challenger in his place; unfortunately the battle would be put on hold for a few minutes after a large collision on the starting grid. Rather than stop the race and restart the organisors took the decision - controversial in retrospect of what happened next - to send out the safety car.

The safety car (or pace car) was a recent import into F1 from American racing, where it was served the dual purpose of slowing the field so crashes could be cleared up and also of bunching the the field of cars. While the concept made sense on high speed oval tracks where the risk to rescuers of another car crashing into them was very high, and the ease of overtaking made relative track position less important to the race, American series also used a pace car on road and street courses - much to the improvement of the spectacle with many processional races being turned back into frantic action packed sprints with the introduction of a timely "Full Course Caution" flag. Many observers wondered if the safety car was being introduced into F1 not just for safety reasons but also to 'spice up' the racing from time to time. In 1993 F1 bosses had been presented with the worrying prospect of their world champion - Nigel Mansell - giving up F1 for the exotic world of American IndyCar racing. Suddenly many F1 fans were talking excitedly about the American series and how it seemed to have retained some of the glamour and danger of F1's previous decades - Mansell's team owner was Paul Newman, his teammate former F1 champ Mario Andretti, both racing against another F1 champ - Emerson Fittipaldi. Rumours swirled that perhaps even Ayrton Senna would be tempted by a
big-bucks offer from Marlboro to race in the Indy 500.

Senna ultimately stayed in F1 after sealing the Williams Renault deal. Unfortunately for the Senna the once-dominant team had struggled to make their new 1994 car handle well and Senna was having to push hard to stay ahead of Michael Schumacher's Benetton. The safety car at the start of the race was not what Senna wanted to happen - before the race he had voiced his concern that it was too slow and that drivers would have trouble keeping tyre pressures and temperatures up to proper levels, a concern for Senna as he knew how awkward his car was to drive unless his set-up was perfect. Tv cameras picked up Senna pulling up to the rear of the safety car, agitatedly waving to it to be removed from his way was as soon as possible. When at last after several painfully slow laps it was brought in Senna and Schumacher took off, immediately creating a gap to the third placed car. The Williams and Benetton disappered past the pits up to the Tamburello curve, round the Imola circuit cheered and saluted with air-horns by the ever-enthusiatic Italian 'tifosi' packing onto the spectactor banks. Senna and Schumacher, already seemingly in a race of their own race were soon back to the start line and blasting back up to Tamburello.

Only one of the two emerged from Tamburello on lap seven. In the middle of the long left hander Senna's car had seemed to wobble from the inside line and then drove straight off across the small dusty concrete run-off area and into the concrete wall at the side of the track. The right front wheel sailed high into the air as the car slewed back towards the track and came to a halt. The impact was heavy but not dramatic looking, and the car was in one piece minus it's front wheel and wing. Concern began to mount as Senna stayed sat stiffly in his car rather than climbing out. His helmeted head wobbled momentarily as if he was coming round from a concussion, but then he again sat motionless. The doctors cars and ambulances arrived, Senna was extricated from his car, and the medical team began working in their familiar practiced but urgent way. Marshalls held tarpaulins up to shield the scene from the prying eyes of the helicopter cameras above, but when Senna was finally moved to the medical helicopter, landed nearby on the track itself, the cameras caught the unmistakable sight of a large pool of blood on the ground where Senna's head had been lain.

Michael Schumacher won the restarted race, but by the race's end all thoughts were turned to Senna's condition. Despite the grave-looking scenes of the rescue earlier much hope remained that the great driver would eventually pull through. At 6:30pm the Bologna hospital announced the worst; Senna was dead, killed by several massive head injuries. The rescutiation effort had been futile; his helmet had been struck by his front wheel on impact with the wall, causing fatal injuries to the back of his skull, and a jagged piece of the car's suspension mounting had pierced his helmet visor, causing another mortal wound in the temple. The shockwaves were immediate and motorsport safety was immediately the lead story throughout the world. Suddenly Ratzenberger's death went from being a back page story the front page in light of Senna's death - two drivers killed in two days was the narrative. Motorsport was suddenly a 'blood' sport again, and in the crosshairs of the world's media.

The storm eventually died down, but not without many placatory measures from the motor sport governing body, the FIA. They announced plans to slow down F1 cars and to make circuits safer. Through the mid-90's F1 cars were gradually strengthened, their sides built up with padding round the driver's cockpit - no longer would the driver's head sit exposed with little side protection. Crash tests were made tougher and rules were changed to slow cars whenever lap times began to reduce dramtically. After the firestorm of criticism that had erupted after Senna's death, when F1's reputation was being crucified by the world's media, the FIA had realised that the sport could never afford to lose such a big star in such a public way ever again. And their aggressive pursuit of safety has ultimately been successful; Ratzenberger and Senna are the last F1 drivers to die in action to date.

The death of Senna and subsequent safety-drive did a great many things to improve the safety of all drivers in motorsport - both in detail improvements to cars and race tracks and also in changing the attitude of the people responsible for safety -  The complacent attitude towards safety that had crept into the racing world in the early 1990's was forever replaced with a more pro-active approach. The huge increase in computer simulation power in the 2000's has facilitated a more scientific-attitude to safety. Bio-dynamics experts, physicists, doctors and car designers can now simulate crashes and study their effects entirely in virtual worlds. The figures involved can be sobering for television viewers almost desentised to the speed and energy developed by racing cars; for example the force of the fatal blow that struck Ayrton Senna from his wheel has been likened to being dropped out of a building from several stories high and landing on one's head. Circuits can be designed on computers for optimum safety; new materials are also making their mark - whether in cars, or crash barriers, (replacing the crude concrete walls and tyre barriers of old), or in helmets and visors. Computer aided-design and rigurous crash testing are now the norm. So, the great irony of Senna's death is that by far the most important safety innovation since the 1990s had been under development since the early stages of the 1980s and was mostly ignored until the after the start of the new millennium. It would untimately take another disaster to get it into widespread use.

In the early 1980's, Professor Robert Hubbard, an expert on biomechanical engineering at Michigan State University, and brother in law to sports car racer called Jim Downing, was pondering the number of fatalities in motor racing caused by severe head injuries. He noticed a weakness in the protection afforded to drivers; while the driver's torso was well restrained with safety belts, and the driver's head shielded by the crash helmet, the driver's neck was completely unharnessed. In a crash the enormous momentum of the driver's head (made even heavier with a helmet) pulling away from the securely fastened torso would build up tremendous forces on the neck and often lead to fatal skull fractures, or paralysis from spinal cord injuries. Hubbard came up with a yoke-shaped device fitting over the drivers shoulders and attaching to side of the crash helmet via stretching tethers. In a crash the device would hold the crash helmet and body together as one, preventing the head from violently snapping forward and dissapating the energy through the shoulders, and ultimately into the seat belts and the seat.

The Head And Neck Support (or 'HANS') was first built in 1985 and tested on crash sleds through the subsequent years. He founded his own company to build and sell the device in 1991 but attracted little interest. After Imola 1994 the FIA made inquiries to Hubbard, but was also seriously considering airbag systems for F1 cars (an idea that was never developed to feasibility). The first racing organisation to use HANS regularly was the drag racing organisation the NHRA, where the extreme high speeds meant violent accidents were practically guaranteed. As drag racers do not have to turn their heads the device was easier to integrate into existing seats and belts. The issue of comfort was more of a concern for circuit racers, who baulked against wearing a bulky yoke over their shoulder's in the tight confines of a racing cockpit, even as light weight carbon fibre HANS devices became available.

During the 2000 NASCAR season the HANS device was trailed by some drivers but still there was resistance to the idea. 7-time NASCAR champion Dale Earnhardt was particularly scornful - referring to the HANS as "that damn noose". By 2000 Earnhardt was the pivotal figure in NASCAR, many years past the height of his powers - when he was the legendary "Intimidator" of the late 1980s and early 90's, winning races aplenty -  but still the living embodiment of everything NASCAR was selling itself as; grassroots, down to earth, self-taught, straight talking, no-nonsense, racing for the common man. And the school drop out turned multi-millionaire Earnhardt had become the hero for what many Americans were increasingly coming to call 'NASCAR dads' - the gender opposite of 'Soccer moms' - middle aged, blue and white collar, conservative men who watched racing on Sunday afternoon. Earnhardt commanded huge incomes from merchandising, sat at the head of a burgeoning business empire, and was the only driver capable of standing toe to toe with NASCAR's ruling France family. When Earnhardt dismissed the HANS his words carried weight. Only a few other drivers felt strong enough to publically disagree and support the HANS's use.

The HANS was being talked about because during the 2000 season two drivers had been killed in NASCAR competition, coincidentally enough in identical crashes at the same corner. During the second-tier Busch series race practice session at the New Hampshire Speedway Adam Petty, 19 year old grandson of the most successful NASCAR driver of all Richard Petty, was killed when his car crashed straight into the concrete wall. Weeks later during the top-level Winston Cup series practice Kenny Irwin was killed in near-identical circumstances. Both drivers were killed instantly from basilar skull fractures, an unusual but devastating injury to the area of the skull at the top of the spine, the kind of injury the HANS was designed to prevent.

Later in the year Dale Earnhardt would take his one victory of the year at Talladega. It would be his 76th and last victory. Earnhardt had famously had terrible luck in NASCAR's most famous race, the season-opening Daytona 500. He had manaaged to find almost every possible way to lose the race including blowing a tyre in the final corner of the last lap in 1990. He finally won the 'big one' in 1998, NAScAR's 50th anniversary year, and three years later was seeking victory again, only as both a driver and as a car owner, with his two cars being driven by his son Dale Jr and Michael Waltrip. The race was also NASCAR's first as part of a new multi-million dollar television deal with the American FOX network, with Earnhardt placed centre stage as part of the marketing of the season. The tragedies of the previous year still rumbled in the background, with another driver, truck series driver Tony Roper being killed, again by a skull fracture, late in the 2000 season. Many drivers were predicting a big crash in the Daytona 500 as a result of tweaks in the rules to try prevent a repeat of the dull 2000 race when cars were unable to pass each other. Ever since the record-breaking speeds of the 1987 season, when drivers could lap the speedways at over 210mph, and the sport came close to disaster when a car nearly flew into the grandstand at Talladega, NASCAR had mandated 'restictor plates' in the engines to lower the horsepower of the cars on the two biggest speedways - Daytona and Talladega. As a result the cars were slowed but raced around in tight packs unable to break apart from each other.

Dale Earnhardt was renowed as a master of 'plate racing' but despite this was distainful of it and "riding around waiting for the 'big one'" was a familiar put-down. Even Earnhardt couldn't get NASCAR to budge from it's need for the plates. Stock cars simply could not be allowed to race at over 210+ mph no matter what, many suspected that NASCAR's insurers secretly stipulated that speeds had to be kept down to prevent any chance of a car flying into the crowd. Before the 2001 race Earnhardt voiced concerns about the closeness of the racing in the warm up races. Like Ayrton Senna before him, people close to Earnhardt claimed later that his demenour in the days before the race seemed 'odd' and suddenly reflective. As if the deaths of the previous year had led him to wonder how much longer he could cheat fate - when some of his marketing men told how they were planning to commemorate his breaking the record for the most consecutive NASCAR starts in mid 2001 with a slew of new merchandise, Earnhardt replied tersely 'that's if I make it that far'.

The last lap of the 2001 Daytona 500 saw Earnhardt sitting in third position. In any previous year he would have been trying everything to win, but this time something was different. He was behind his two cars - Dale Jr, and Waltrip. And, to borrow terms from another American sport, instead of offence he was playing defence; trying to block the following pack from reaching his cars. It was a plan that ultimately worked, for Waltrip indeed won the race, except that Earnhardt would never know it. In the last corner at almost the same place his tyre had blown in 1990, his famous black number 3 was tagged lightly from behind, wobbled down the track before slewing back up across the following cars and head on towards the outside wall. At the last instant Earnhardt was tagged in the right door by Ken Schrader's oncoming car, changing the angle of the upcoming impact to virtually a right angle. On television that hit didn't look dramatic at all, but the camera angles were deceptive; Earnhardt's car went from 180+mph to a stop in an instant. When Ken Schrader climbed from his car to check on Earnhardt he began to motion frantically to rescue crews after looking inside the car.

The rescue crews arrived and cut the roof from the car to extracate the driver, an ambulance pulled up and took the driver to the nearest hospital. It was all for nothing; like Petty, Irwin and Roper, Earnhardt had died from a basilar skull fracture. Had he been wearing a HANS in all likelihood he would have survived virtually unscathed. The tragedy sent an even bigger shockwave through NASCAR than even Senna's death had sent through F1. Earnhardt *was* NASCAR, stickers with his iconic italic number '3' graced millions of car windows throughout the American midwest and south. It was, as many noted, as if motor racing's "Elvis" had died. The shock completely changed mindsets - drivers clamoured to wear head restraints, and they were soon made mandatory, not just in NASCAR but throughout all racing.

Since 2001 countless drivers in all fields of competition have suffered heavy impacts and walked away. Serious head injuries of the type that once killed drivers have decreased massively. Today the only major danger for racing drivers that remains a very real hazard is blunt head trauma from hitting track or roadside objects (as in the crash that killed Indy 500 winner Dan Wheldon in 2011), being struck by other cars at high speed, or from being hit by debris or tyres (F3 driver Henry Surtees was killed by a loose wheel striking him in 2009). Motor racing remains inherintly dangerous because there will always be risk in racing competively at speed, in close proximity with other cars, often in remote locations far from medical attention. Humans can only protect themselves so much from the danger of impacts. As Jackie Stewart once observed: "We think racing is becoming safe. Until the wrong accident occurs".

Believing in Conspiracy Theories

---- Wrote this piece after reading David Aaronovitch's 'Voodoo Histories', Michael Shermer's "Why People Believe Weird Things" and listening to 'Reclaiming History' by Vincent Bugliosi. It doesn't have any footnotes or reference or anything academic. It's just my impression on a subject.


We are a naturally cautious species. Our caution has kept us collectively alive for millenia so far. Our far ancestors were cautious about predators, diseases, natural hazards, the weather, and the motivations of others in their group. In our world we have less reason to be worried about natural hazards, the risk of death from animal attacks, and the threat of disease has been vastly reduced. But while the immediate danger has been reduced the worldwide danger has become far higher; nuclear weapons, climate change, global financial crises - these are the stuff of conspiracies and where our caution and suspicion is now directed.

Conspiracies happen all of the time in business and politics, and, suspicious, we look for the warning signs of the next one; groups of powerful men engaged in secret meetings behind closed doors; bodyguards and police escorts keeping them protected; leaked memos and dossiers with secret information blanked out. The warning signs are all there that something deeply suspicious is going on. All too frequently it turns out that our suspicions are correct. For example in recent history the holder of US presidency has attempted to cover up illegal wiretapping of political rivals (Nixon), authorised covert arms trading for hostages (Reagan), and engaged in an extra-marital affair with an office intern (Clinton)- and each explicity denied doing so before being forced to reveal the truth.

So when, for example, the president is shot dead by a high powered rifle while riding in motorcade; or when a ragtag bunch of box-cutter wielding fanatics pull off a spectacular multiple hijacking; or when a transatlantic airliner mysteriously explodes after takeoff: We begin asking questions; how can our leaders have allowed this to happen, unless they were somehow part of it? And if they were part of it, would they not pretend that they were not, issuing denials and writing official reports absolving themselves of any blame? That, after all is what they did before when they were discovered to lying.

Yet not every event can be the result of conspiracy and shadowy background dealings. A trawl through the history books will reveal that for every event that was proven to be a conspiracy there will be many more that were proven to be down to pure chance with no credible evidence that anything other than pure happenstance was at work. So why do so many people refuse to accept that there is nothing 'hidden' to find and insist on a conspiracy? Why are tiny anomalies and minor inconsistencies so often able to overpower the vast amounts of contrary evidence, never mind sheer rationality and common sense and mushroom into monsters with millions of supporters, who seem to have surrounded themselves to stubborn, almost wilful irrationality?

---Bad Science

The popular imagination casts conspiracy theorist as delusional fanatics, yet most most conspiracists are intelligent, rational, and knowledgeable people. Most conspiracists clearly know their stuff and have worked hard to amass their evidence and build their theories. The problem is that at it's heart a conspiracy theory is a created by a reversal of the usual scientific method. The truly skeptical researcher starts with a completely null hypothesis and examines all the evidence without preconceived notions or agendas. Most historians, scientists, researchers, inventors and engineers base their theories and ideas around things they can know, their theories will allow for new information, and they will revise their theories if new evidence comes to light to fill in the blanks.

The conspiracy theory begins with a supposition and then sets out to find evidence to support it. As enough potential evidence exists to virtually guarantee an anomaly somewhere there will always be something that somebody looking for a conspiracy will be able to latch onto and tout as 'proof'. Visit the average conspiracist website or read any conspiracist book and the reader will inevitably be swamped by an enormous mass of information, data, quotes, witness statements etc. Yet stacking all of these little pieces together does not collectively make them stronger, they are still merely anomalies rather than concrete evidence.

Starting with a goal in mind also distorts the interpretation of evidence. "Consistent with..." is not the same as "evidence of..." For an example of how this works consider the videos freely available on the internet showing close-up shot of the World Trade Center towers on 9/11. When zoomed-in these videos appear to show some people being blown out from the windows of the tower. There is little to argue about here; the extraordinary footage clearly shows this horrifying fact. However, the argument comes when trying to interpret what is going on. Conspiracy advocates claim this as evidence of explosives being placed in the buildings to bring them down deliberately. How else, they ask, could people possibly be blown bodily out of office windows unless by explosives? The reply comes from those with knowledge of the effects of large fires in buildings; fires can create huge differences in air pressures in buildings - the famous "Backdraft" (where oxygen is suddenly re-introduced into a space by the opening of a door or window, creating a dangerous flash fire) is one of these effects - in a building as large as a WTC tower with such a powerful fire burning such a pressure could build up that could easily blow a person out of a window, no explosives required.

This shows that even a rational, thorough researcher can come up with erroneous theories if they don't weigh up all the evidence fairly. Most conspiracy theories are emphatically sure of their theories because they were arrived at in a rational way, but starting from a biased perspective. In fact they often accuse their detractors of having the same problem. In their mind they are the ones thinking critically and asking the difficult questions and the rest of us are the uncritical believers, blindly going along with whatever the government or big business tells us. They consider themselves the 'scientific' thinkers, because they are questioning the status-quo, picking things apart and trying to find what is 'really' going on.

One of the most consistently surprising things about die-hard conspiracists is how frequently they are concerned by *exactly* the same problems as the skeptics who endeavour to debunk their theories. On message board after message board completely crackpot suggestions and ideas sit side by side with discussions that would not be out of place on a skeptical forum. Just as the skeptics ponder how so many conspiracy believers can be so credulous, the believers wonder how the general public can be credulous about the 'lies' they have 'been sold'.

Most conspiracists clearly know their stuff and have worked hard to amass their evidence and build their theories. The problem is that the conspiracist has frequently invested far too much time and emotion to be truly objective and rational. Self reinforcement and 'confirmation' bias extends to filtering out contradictory views. An author who has spent decades researching a particular historical event and constructing elaborate stories of conspiracy is not about to objectively examine all the evidence they have found and decide that they are mistaken and there is nothing to see. Humans are remarkably stubborn when it comes to changing our minds and with any historical event there is usually far too much information out there for the conspiracist to collect, ruminate on, and use to paint into elaborate theories, for them to ever change their minds

---- Cherry Picking

It could be that we are hard wired to have a skewed perspective. Just as we evolved caution to kept us alive through the millenia, so we developed a facility to learn by remembering things that seemed important and discarding those that did not.  Nobody has the capacity to see the world completely objectively - we see what is relevant to us, whether it is the procedures at a job, the names of friends, or revising the key points in a textbook for exams. This is 'confirmation bias', remembering the hits and not the misses, or "cherry picking".

The upshot of this is that the conspiracy theory forms as a subjective view of the world rather than an objective end product of the study of the available facts. This is why such theories can frequently seem so blinkered to the impartial observer but perfectly rational to their proponents. Just as we may remember one particularly memorable person we saw during the day and forget all of the others, so a theory will focus in on one or two anomalous witness statements that contend something 'strange' was going on, while disregarding the hundreds of other witnesses who said no such thing. With thousands of bits of data to ponder over, with some anomalies and contradictions, almost any theory can be made to 'fit' the data.

---- Story Telling

It isn't just confirmation bias on it's own that creates a distorted view of reality; there is also our need to create a story. We all all natural born story tellers, it is how we usually communicate complicated information, experiences and knowledge. Stories are not abstract, they need causes and effects and internal logic, and they are usually simplified to improve comprehension for the listener. This is fine for casual anecdotes and for fiction writers but it creates a problem when trying to understand real world events, a place that frequently does not conform to expectations formed by the consumption of movies, novels and television dramas. In the real world things happen at random often without clear causes and emotionally satisfying conclusions.

It is often said that conspiracy theories are so popular because they are better, more *juicy*, stories than often mundane truth, and there is something to this, but perhaps more importantly conspiracies also thrive because they are perceived as the more ''plausible'' story. Consider any major assassination: What seems more likely to our story-telling, narrative-seeking minds; that a lone gunman can hit a world leader, with all of their security arrangements - bodyguards, secret agents, armed protection, bullet-proof cars etc. Or that somebody on the 'inside' somebody who can circumvent all the security, is the culprit? The latter option simply sounds more ''likely''; it is easier to understand and there is an obvious chain of cause and effect. Psychologist like the use the phrase 'agency detection' for this way of thinking - we latch on to the 'agent' - in this case a mysterious 'insider' - whose actions provide the trigger for all subsequent actions.

The lone gunman story relies on contingencies, chances, and blind luck, and how many fictional stories or anecdotes revolve around contingencies, chances and blind luck? How often do people recount a story about something they did at the weekend without a clear subject or a punchline? How many movies end with the hero being shot dead out of the blue by a stranger for no reason? Some do - ironically enough they are usually referred to as more 'avant-garde' offerings despite being somewhat authentic to the real world.

The fact is that we are not very good at understanding probabilities. Conspiracy theories may often seem like the more plausible story but that is only because we so frequently fail to take into account the fact that highly improbable things are bound to happen every day. The most commonly-cited paranormal example of this is the so called 'psychic connection' phenomenon where people report thinking or dreaming about a person and finding out soon after that they died at that exact moment. For an individual person this is an extremely improbable event, but in a population group of hundreds of millions of people it is bound to happen to at least a few hundred people a year. Lotteries are another example of this; individual odds are astronomical but the chance that the prize will be won is nearly 1 in 1. Apply the same thinking to conspiracies and suddenly the 'lone gunman' doesn't seem so unlikely. The chance that somebody in the crowd will try to assassinate a politician on any given day is very small, but ask the same question of the politician's entire career and suddenly the odds shorten considerably.

The facts bear this out: Several American presidents (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Kennedy) have been assassinated by a single gunman with a grievance (although Lincoln's death was planned by a conspiracy of men- as mentioned before conspiracies ''do'' happen), and several others (Teddy Roosevelt, FD Roosevelt, Ford, Reagan) were shot-at by would-assassins who missed the target. Terrorist groups have been involved in countless hijackings of large airliners, and several simultaneous hijackings had taken place before 9/11. There had been thwarted attempts to commandeer planes by individuals bent on a destructive suicide mission, and in California in 1987 at least one example of a somebody who did succeed in overpowering the pilots and crashing an airliner. Strangely enough, this was (almost) an 'inside job' - the perpetrator was a disgruntled ex-airline employee, circumventing security with his credentials. The lesson of course is always to consider the evidence on it's own terms without applying 'gut' feelings to the situation. Unfortunately the 'evidence' isn't always easily forthcoming.

---- Unknowns

In history there will always be many unknowns to ponder, and the unknown is the fuel for the conspiracy fire. Anybody who questions the conspiracy theory will almost inevitably be met with the familiar retort; "Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence", or 'just because we can't prove it happened doesn't mean you can prove it didn't happen'. This maxim is the backbone of most conspiracies because it is impossible to argue against. No matter how hard the disbeliever tries, they can never conclusively eliminate absolutely every possible alternate theory or answer every question. Some questions by their very nature are perfectly valid but impossible to answer. For example JFK conspiracists will challenge skeptics to explain the motives of Lee Oswald; why, they ask, if Oswald was so keen to assassinate the President why did he not confess when caught? A good question, but sadly as Oswald was himself shot before a trial the answer is forever unknowable to us.

The admonition that 'absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence' matters only if the opponent is arguing that the absence of evidence is proof that there never can be any evidence in the future. 'They laughed at Galileo', 'They laughed at Copernicus', 'They laughed at the Wright Brothers' claim those promoting tenuous theories. And indeed they may have done, but over time for those people the absence of evidence became the abundance of evidence, the laughter stopped, and the naysayers faded away. Just as alternative medicine becomes simply 'medicine' if it is proven to work, then a conspiracy theory becomes a conspiracy fact if there is enough proof.

A prime example of conspiracies springing from a paucity of evidence is matter of the Shakespeare authorship question. For all that William Shakespeare is the most famous of English language playwrights we know very little about the man himself beyond a few legal documents in the British national archives. We have a few likenesses of the man, but cannot be certain how accurate any of them are. There are no original manuscripts of Shakespeare's plays, no personal journals or notes, no other works in Shakespeare's hand. All that connects us to Shakespeare's work is the First Folio posthumously compiled by his colleagues Hemings and Condall, and the contemporary published versions of his sonnets. Naturally all of this uncertainly leads to speculation. Did this mysterious 'Shakespeare' character really write the plays? Perhaps the name was a pseudonym for someone who could not reveal their identity. A nobleman perhaps, or maybe even a noblewoman?

While this is all very interesting it doesn't alter the fact that while there is very little evidence for Shakespeare there is zero evidence for anybody else being Shakespeare. And while there is little evidence for Shakespeare there is still some evidence, and some of it is quite strong. For example contemporary records of the Royal court name Shakespeare as author of several of his plays, a pretty unimpeachable source of information. The diaries of other contemporaries mention Shakespeare as playwright. Fellow playwright Ben Jonson wrote a eulogy praising his talent - a strange thing to do for somebody who didn't exist. Unless more evidence is unearthed the default position of historians, experts and school textbooks remains that Shakespeare was the author, just as Oswald was the shooter of President Kennedy, 9/11 was an act by 19 terrorists and TWA flight 800 was an accident.

---- Bias

Then there is the question of bias, be it political, personal, or ideological bias. Nobody in the world is exempt from bias. Everybody plays favourites; from favoured political ideals to our favourite movie stars, we are all inclined to view some people and ideas more favourably than others. Even the most resolutely skeptical historian cannot claim that there aren't a few conspiracy theories or salacious rumours that deep in their heart they would *like* to be found true, even if their rational head knows that is unlikely to happen. For those less grounded in rationality the effect of bias is obvious. Many ardent conservative right-wingers in America are "Birthers" because they ''want'' Barack Obama to be found ineligible for the Presidency. On the other end of the spectrum the leftists think George W Bush had a hand in the 9/11 terrorist attacks because they ''want'' Bush to held accountable for what they percive to be war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. When emotions run high the chances of a rational impartial skeptical inquiry rapidly flies out of the window.

Curiosity is driven by desire and passion - be it the passion for knowledge or the desire to become emotionally or physically closer to a subject. This powerful emotional force drives biographers to devote years of work to writing about a single individual, it leads UFO buffs to flock to small desert towns, leads millions to the gates of Elvis Presley's Graceland, JFK's grave at Arlington, Shakespeare's Stratford upon Avon, and many many more sacred grounds.

Just as conspiracies are fuelled by the great mysteries, so they gather around the great people. And the when mystery combines with importance and a cult of personality conspiracy theories are bound to follow. From JFK to RFK, MLK to Malcolm X, Princess Diana to Princess Grace, John Lennon to Kurt Cobain ... if they were powerful, important, talented, beautiful people whose deaths left more questions than answers then alternative histories are guaranteed. It is not hard to understand why; officially Marilyn Monroe died from an overdose of sleeping pills. ''Un''-officially she was murdered by CIA operatives on the orders of Bobby Kennedy. One of these stories is emotionally satisfying - one of the 20th century's most iconic, beautiful people was not so depressed that she committed suicide (or, even more unthinkably, *accidentally* killed herself) with a bottle of pills. Something, anything, else must have happened. Just as a charismatic political leader ''could not'' be killed by a nobody with a rifle, and Princesses don't die because they didn't put a seat belt on.  

When celebrity is absent then political ideology can be a powerful force in it's own right, and will create martyrs out of ordinary folk and cause-celebres from mundane circumstances. Consider an unusual murder case from England; In 1984 a British pensioner called Hilda Murrell was found dead in woodland near her house. The house had been disturbed by an intruder but strangely nothing of value was missing. Witnesses reported seeing the elderly lady's car being driven erratically through nearby streets. The investigating police were confounded - there was no motive, few clues and no leads, and the case went cold. But soon the rumours began - Hilda Murrell had been a prominent campaigner against nuclear weapons, and her son had been a senior officer on board the British submarine that infamously sank the Argentine cruiser ''General Belgrano'' outside an exclusion zone during the 1982 Falklands war, an international incident that presented one of the few potential problems in the facade of Prime Minster Margaret Thatcher's government.

In the following years the consensus of most of the left-leaning, anti-government, anti-nuclear, anti-Thatcher intelligensia was that Hilda Murrell had been 'silenced' in a botched surveillance mission by MI-6 operatives. In the absence of any other evidence those sympathetic to ideals that Hilda Murrell stood for formed their own satisfactory answer. Then, twenty years after the murder, police arrested a local man who had been a teenager in 1984. Samples of genetic material saved from the cottage and the body were tested for a DNA profile (technology unavailable to police in 1984) and a match was made. The suspect was found guilty of murder and jailed. There had been no conspiracy, no MI-6 operatives, no government cover-up. Merely a disturbed teenager who broke into a random cottage and panicked when confronted by the owner. Still, despite the conviction, Hilda Murrell's son refused to believe the 'official' story and stuck by his opinion that MI-6 and the government *had* to be in on it somehow.

Time and again conspiracy theories come back to the all-pervading enemy:'The Government'. The Government is the easiest of targets. Every day will carry news of government mistakes, corruption and downright lies. Mistrust of government is an enormous driving force behind conspiracies - the skeptical voice is inevitably met by tides of dismissive, almost condescending voices decrying the naivety of anybody who doubts the limitless power and total moral bankruptcy of 'The Government'. Undoubtedly governments around the world do little to dispel the cynical opinion of them, but all too often conspiracy theories are built on a shaky foundation of guilt by association rather than solid evidence.

September 11th conspiracies provide the most prominent example of politicians being tried and convicted by popular opinion based on their various other indiscretions. The presidency of George W. Bush from 2000 to 2008 was marked by three enormously contentious controversies. The initial election in 2000 was one of the most messy events in American electoral history. Bush won over Al Gore but only after a Supreme Court ruling that stopped recounts in the key swing state in Florida. Then after the 9/11 attacks came the US military invasion of Afghanistan, an invasion made without the consent of the United Nations Security Council and an act of questionable legality. Thirdly came the invasion of Iraq; a second potentially illegal invasion predicated on a threat that the country supposedly possessed Weapons Of Mass Destruction despite the complete lack of any evidence of this. In light of these abuses of Presidential and governmental power the leap that 9/11 'Truther's' make to accuse the Bush administration of being at best complicit in allowing 9/11 to happen, and at worst of planning and executing the entire attack seems to be a very small one.

To more easily understand the logical problems involved with Guilt By Association it helps to consider the accusations that conspiracy theorists make in the context of a legal case. Convicting the Bush Administration of planning 9/11 because they have been involved in other crimes is logically no different to convicting a defendant of murder because they already have another conviction for murdering someone else. In the same vein the classic conspiracist tactic of suggesting that the lack of evidence of a conspiracy is evidence of the sheer overarching power of the Government to cover up their actions is equivalent to convicting a defendant of murder because the complete lack of evidence proves how well they executed the murder. The legal system requires positive evidence for a murder conviction, and for 9/11 conspiracies to be accepted would require some hard evidence too, not just pointing fingers at other government scandals.

---- Evidence

So what about the rest of us, the people without vested interests. What reels in the fence sitters to believing in the conspiracy? Put simply we are not, and cannot be, experts in everything. Most of us can only claim to be experts of a few subjects, for the rest we are ignorant. "Ignorance" is a word with a pejorative flavour to it, but it is the only word to describe how many people come to believe in conspiracies. But it is not ignorance of the world, ignorance of people, ignorance of world affairs or in any sense a consequence of lack of general education or a sign of stupidity. It is ignorance of ''details''. It usually takes experts to take a stand and dismantle conspiracy theories because specialised expertise is needed to understand and explain the flaws in the theory. Without it then it is hardly unreasonable to draw a conclusion of conspiracy if one honestly thinks that is what the evidence suggests.

The Moon Landing Hoax is a perfect example of a theory that has been formed around lack of knowledge, misunderstandings, and the following of received wisdom over the laws of physics. At first glance the idea that NASA somehow faked the Apollo moon missions between 1968 and 1972 seems absurd yet the contentious points raised by theorists are superficially intriguing. Why, if the astronauts are on the moon are there no stars in the photos? Why is there no blast crater under the lunar lander? What about the solar radiation in space that would've cooked the astronauts? How could the American flag planted on the moon wave as if in a breeze? To the expert they are all easily explained and the idea that anybody would use them as a basis for a conspiracy is laughable, but all of these questions seem reasonable to the lay person without much knowledge of the moon and space exploration. It takes specific insight to understand why they are not contentious issues at all.

Our 'common sense' tells us that if we can see stars in the night sky then we should see stars in photographs, but we forget that our cameras work differently from our eyes. Even on the moon, stars are far too dim to be picked up by relatively short photographic exposures. We are used to living on a world with an atmosphere, but the moon has no atmosphere. When the lunar lander touched down it left no blast crater because there were no air currents to 'blast' a crater, merely the small interactions between dust particles directly hitting each other. Solar radiation is indeed a problem ''in a long exposure'', the Apollo craft was only briefly exposed to danger and part of the flight plan was to orient the ship to place the spaceship's fuel tanks as a 'buffer' between the crew and the solar radiation if an unexpected solar flare arose. The flag was in fact ''designed'' to look as if it were flying by being hung from an L shaped frame. It moved when the astronauts touched it, but at no other moment did it move even when astronauts walked right past it. There are many other examples of things that suggest strongly the astronauts are indeed on the moon; the perfect parabolic arcs of dust rising from the wheels of the lunar rover being a prime example.

Movies and TV must share some of the blame for propagating the misconceptions that lead conspiracies to flourish in the general consciousness. Firearms are an essential element of most action movies and cop shows yet few people know much about the mechanics of how they work. This ignorance has been a huge driver in the continued existence of JFK assassination conspiracies. When the Zapruder film of the assassination was first shown to the American public on a television talk show in 1974 the initial reaction of the host (Geraldo Rivera) to the violent backwards motion of Kennedy's head at the fatal shot reflected most people's reaction; Kennedy was shot from the front. Ergo; the official story was wrong. We expect people to fly backwards away from their shooter because that is what happens in movies. But in movies people are not being shot, they are jumping backwards while an explosive squib on their front pops. To a physicist the backwards motion in the film is perfectly consistent with a shot from behind; it is Newton's third law at work. The huge exit wound creates a recoil in the head, which moves back, towards the shooter.

Many conspiracy claims are easily refuted by simple experimentation. The Kennedy shot has been replicated by shooting head-sized grapefruits with a rifle and the fruit dutifully falls back towards the shot. Oliver Stone's movie 'JFK' contented that Lee Oswald could not possibly have reloaded his bolt action rifle in time to make all the shots. Many people have found a Mannlicher Carcano rifle and tried the task on the shooting range. The result? There is no problem at all, Oswald easily had enough time to make his shots. Unfortunately the videos of these experiments have barely a fraction of the viewers that Stone's blockbuster movie has had, although perhaps in a world of Youtube channels the balance may start to shift slightly in the future.

Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 Platinum Guide

------ I've spent far too much of my life playing this game in front of the TV. Ended up writing a guide for it. Bit redundant as there are loads on GameFAQs already. And there's already a list like the one at the end of the real roller coasters in the game. Still fun to write though.
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Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 Platinum Guide


This guide assumes that the player has used the various gameplay tutorials and is familiar with the interface of the game and the various functions. It is not a walkthrough of every scenario or a comprehensive list of every feature in the game and the expansion packs but is a general guide to playing the scenarios and creating an efficient and profitable park.

It also assumes that the full Platinum edition is being played with all of the features added in the Soaked! and Wild! expansion packs.

Key:
1; Basics
2; Park Layout
3; Staff and Animals
4; Finances
5; Tricky Terrain
6; Weather
7; 'La La Land'
8; Challenges
9; Roller coasters

1; Basics

Scenario Objectives:

The game has several different types of scenario objective to pass in order to unlock the next scenario, provide new land to buy, and unlock new roller coaster layouts. Each scenario objective can be at three increasingly difficult levels. Here is a list of the objectives along with a brief summary of what is needed to achieve it.

Park Stats

- Park rating:
Build a large park and keep it tidy.

- Visitors in park:
The larger a park is and the more high excitement rides it has, the more visitors it will attract and the longer they will stay.

- Maintain park rating:
Usually over several months so lookout for any problems that might cause the rating to dip momentarily.

- Maintain visitors in park:
Easier to achieve with a 'buffer zone' of visitors - build a big ride when nearing the required figure to draw in more visitors.

Financial

- Ride/pool complex/viewing gallery income:
Not profit, just income. Income from the rides, pool complexes or viewing galleries individually. Sometimes requires a bit of luck (see below in 'Random Variables'.

- Pay off loan:
Make enough money to click the loan tab down to $0.00. Note that this needs to be achieved only once, and then the loan can immediately be put up again.

Rides

- Roller coaster excitement:
Or, in other words, amass enough money to build a big coaster. Can be a custom ride or a ride imported from the coaster designer.

- Roller coaster stats:
Basically a challenge to utilise the more expensive coaster types. The cheap coasters won't be able to run at 80 mph for example.

VIPs

The VIP tab has a route planner to direct the VIP to the required attraction. Unfortunately you have to wait for the VIP to leave the park for the objective to be passed. The VIP will have various 'tolerances' to mess in the park, and can leave early if unimpressed, but this is usually not a problem in a well run park.
- Wants to visit roller coaster
- Wants to visit fireworks
- Wants to visit themed areas (see the 'La La Land' entry below)
- Wants to see animals

Animals (Wild!)

- Minimum number of animals
Includes animals that are bought or born to your existing animals.

- Release animals into the wild
Only adult animals with 95% or above health can be released.

- Make money from selling animals
Animals can be sold at any time, even immediately after they have been bought.

Scenery

- Themed rides
Place enough scenery pieces around a ride (walls are good for this) and open the ride.

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Scenario Objectives can Be Passed at Any Level.

The game hides the the Entrepreneur and Tycoon objectives to try to stop you from breaking them on the previous level but many times it is not difficult to work out what they might be. For example if an Entrepreneur objective is a coaster of with an excitement of 6, then the Tycoon objective just may very well be excitement of 7. Building a '7' coaster to begin with will pass both objectives in one go.

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Park Rating Low? There's a Dirty Path Somewhere

If your park rating is way down it is almost always because of litter and vomit on paths. Hire more janitors, put in litter bins, and take a closer look under roofs and in underground paths for any hidden oases of mess that you can't see but the game's engine can.

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Soaked! And Wild! Addon Packs Make The Original Easier

Installing Soaked and Wild, or playing the full Platinum edition will make the original RCT 3 scenarios easier since pool complexes and animal pens will still be available to build in all of these scenarios, thus spoiling the challenge slightly.

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The Pause Button.

You can plan ahead and build while paused - it saves you from the hassle of dealing with other problems while trying to plan your next moves, especially when laying out roller coasters. If test mode is selected while the building tool is still open a 'ghost' train will run on the track even when the game is paused*. Using the ghost testing mode will show how the coaster is working as it is being built. An exception can be made if your park is making tidy monthly profits - then building a coaster while time is running can save you from needing to take out a loan to pay to finish the ride off.
* (If not then try unpausing the game for a few moments and the train will start to move)

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The Fast Forward Button.

If you only have one more objective left, and a reasonably 'stable' park, then hitting the fast forward button is usually an easy way to save time waiting for the objective to be met.


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2; Park Layout.

The basic idea with the park is to keep your visitors in for as long as possible and to satisfy as many of them as you can. Like real people each guest has a unique profile of what kind of ride they prefer. Some guests preferred ride stats will mean they never want to ride the most extreme rides so you need to provide some gentler rides for them. Placing a gentler ride or a thrill ride next door to one of your roller coasters is a good way to keep everybody happy.

Try not to have unnecessary paths leading off to nowhere. You want your paths to take your visitors past as many rides as possible and to allow your mechanics to quickly access your rides to fix them. Plus the more paths there are the more janitors will be needed to keep the paths clean and maintain the park rating. If several janitors are needed to clean paths that have no rides on them then money is being wasted unnecessarily.

Many scenarios will begin with long stretches of path leading into large swathes of empty land. You may wish to use these paths for your park but seeing as the game gives money back for bulldozing paths then they can be quite a useful source of income at the beginning of the scenario.

Note that although the paths in the game will come to look crowded the guests apparently don't notice any overcrowding, but for aesthetic reasons you may wish to widen the paths to stop things looking so congested.

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Queues.

If there is a queue line for a ride then visitors will join it expecting to be entertained in short order (no South Park 'Line Rides' here folks). You need to keep tabs on whether or not the lines are getting too long and people are complaining (the message 'the line for XXX is ridiculous' will appear). For rides with quick turnovers of passengers like most roller coasters the line can be a reasonable length (about ten squares). For rides that can only take a few people at once (the spiral slide being a prime example) don't put in more than three queue tiles or there will be grumbles from frustrated guests. The queue TV monitors will mollify some of this effect, as will the costumed entertainers.

It also helps to try and keep the entrance to the queue as near to the exit as possible to encourage repeat rides, those riders who liked the ride so much they want to go straight back on again.

Some gentle and thrill rides are so cheap to build and run that you may consider simply having two of them next door to each other to overcome their low capacity.

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Facilities.

No matter how many amazing rides your park has it must have some of the basic facilities. The key ones are toilets, and the food and drink stalls. These must be built in any park of any size as all of your guests will eventually need them. Every guest has several stat bars that reflect their general heath and well being and you will need to make sure that their need for the toilet, food, and drink aren't distracting them from your rides. Unfortunately the food and drink stalls have a side effect; litter, trash and mess. So the building of food stalls means a few janitors will be needed to sweep up, and litter bins should be placed on paths to keep things tidy.

The information stall is an extremely useful stall since it sells maps and umbrellas. Maps will stop your guests wandering off into empty areas of your park and umbrellas will make them far less bothered about rain showers. Place an information stall or two near the entrance of the park to maximise it's effectiveness. Then place a few more at even spaces around the park.

The ATM helps prevent your guests leaving your park because they have run out of cash and is a must-have facility in any decent sized park. The first aid stall is, as it sounds, a place that will remove the nausea from your guests and stop them throwing up all over your nice clean paths. You cannot charge for the ATM or the First Aid stall but as long as you have plenty of ride income coming in it's a negligible cost.

Tailor the number of food stalls to the number of guests. If you see the message that 'xxxx stall is too busy', add another stall nearby. Beware of creating 'food court' arrangements though; some of the scenarios will come with these already in place and they can be a pit of litter and vomit that sends the park rating plummeting and needs a permanent janitor on site.

The 'Synchronise All Stalls of This Type' box is an invaluable time saver as it will synch the prices, food toppings, and accessory colours across all the stalls. Guests will occasionally grumble if you don't provide any toppings at all (no ketchup on the hot dogs or ice in the drinks etc) and the synch function is the best way of making sure all food stalls have some toppings.

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3; Staff and Animals

Two members of staff are vital to the running of your park. The mechanic fixes your rides when they break down, cleans your pool complexes, and in Wild! will also repair broken animal fences to prevent escapes. The janitor cleans the paths, waters the plants and keeps the park rating high. Obviously the bigger your park gets the more staff you will need. If a staff member is being asked to do too much they will complain that 'I'm being run ragged' and that is the time to hire some more staff. As noted above an efficient path layout can make the most out of your staff, but they can also be set specific patrol zones to make sure they do as much work as they can.

Just be careful to keep them happy and diligent - staff who get too fed up can quit and leave you having to hire a replacement, and with lazy staff you aren't getting your money's worth of work. A good way to do this is to train them up at least two of the three levels as soon as you hire them - it's relatively cheap and is a one-time cost compared to hiking up their monthly wage. Their happiness will boost and laziness will decrease.

Almost every original RCT 3 scenario will begin without staff except for the park inspector. In Soaked and Wild scenarios there will sometimes be existing staff. The park can run for a short time without a mechanic or janitor if you are really struggling for money but as soon as a ride breaks down or vomit begins to appear on the paths you will need them.

The animal keepers in Wild! are similar to janitors in function. They clean up dung in the animal enclosures and keep the animal house stocked with food. Without these functions the animal health declines rapidly until the Animal Protection League flies in to confiscate your animals. The same rules apply to animal keepers as janitors; train them up to keep them happy and add more if they look like being overwhelmed with dung to shovel up.

Entertainers and security guards are a largely optional to your park, and only become useful in larger parks where the queues are longer and vandalism of your benches is more likely.

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Animals

Contrary to appearances your animals will behave much like your staff - they are essentially both AI characters who need money spent on them. The only difference being that animals will breed (if there is both a male and female together in the same enclosure of course). Instead of spending money on wages you spend money on food and the more frequently you feed your animals the healthier they will be. Animal heath is the key to releasing them into the wild - only adult animals with over 95% health can released into the wild. Cleaning up their enclosures will also help push their health up to the required level.

Each animal needs enough habitat to move about in or they will be very unhealthy. When building from scratch this is really a case of using basic common sense; don't stick a tiger in four square enclosure, give it space to run around. Some scenarios will start with animals crammed into some nightmarishly small enclosures, so before you do anything else expand their enclosure to a reasonable size. Scenery is not as important as it seems and animals really only want a few trees to scratch themselves on.

The third problem to deal with is animal's social requirements. Some don't mind sharing their enclosure - even with other species - but others are more solitary and will be upset by more than a couple of other animals in their space. This is a problem if the scenario requirement needs lots of one kind of animal.  The only solution is to build several separate enclosures for the same animals. It's a pain in the neck having to build animal houses and employ more keepers but it's the only way to get the numbers you need. Breeding animals will add to your numbers so keep an eye out when a new arrival is announced that it's presence isn't making it's fellows unhappy.

Animals break down into three social types:

Gregarious: Apes, camels, ostriches, horses and zebras don't seem to mind lots of individuals.

Family groups: Big cats, bears, and kangaroos tolerate around six or seven individuals.

Solitary: Pandas. Preferably one or two. Absolute maximum of three. Rhinos are ok with four or five in an enclosure.

Last but not least, don't put zebras in the same enclosure as lions. It's won't be a pretty sight.



4; Finances.

In sandbox mode money is no object but in the scenarios you must make more than you are spending or your park will go nowhere fast. Opening up the finances tab presents what looks like a daunting task; all those overheads and only a few sources of income. Worse, in most scenarios most of your money is tied up in a loan whose interest is sucking cash from your coffers. But in practice it isn't too hard to make a decent profit, just follow some simple rules;

-Everything makes a profit.
Only those things that you can't charge for should be losing money (ATMs, First Aid buildings, and maybe toilets as you can only charge a tiny amount for them before guests object). Rides that require big loans to make should make back that loan after a year or two. Shop profit should be more than the cost of stock - don't add lashings of toppings to food in a park with only a few guests. Nothing should be standing idle. Fortunately the finance sheet is easy enough to read and allows you to see at a glance if there are problems.

-Don't Overcharge or Undercharge.
Guests will not pay for something they don't think is worth it. A general rule of thumb is to charge about the same as the excitement level of the ride. So a coaster of 6 excitement charge between $6 and $7. It's a trial and error task and the guest thought bar is a good guide. If they think your ride is 'good value' you can raise the price. If they think 'I'm not paying that much!' drop the fee. The same applies to stores, animal enclosures and pools. Store prices can usually be hiked up a few notches from the default price. Animal enclosures are made more appealing by a mix of adults and babies, as well as having healthy animals. Swimming pool complexes can have higher fees with big slides, and should have too since individual slides can't charge fees.

-Beware charging park entrance fees.
This will decrease your guests willingness to pay for rides, sometimes dramatically. One scenario stops you from charging for rides; in this case you can bump up the entry fee and use new rides to draw in as many visitors as you can.

-Maximise riders.
Every ride needs a decent turnaround of riders. Keep this in mind when designing roller coasters and setting the length of ride settings for thrill rides and transit rides. For coasters try to fit in as many cars a possible, or even have two trains. The 'Block section' operation can allow more than one train on a ride with a one-train sized station. The 'Leave if another train arrives' order is useful for keeping transit rides moving, as is increasing the speed at which they run. With the 'static' rides keep an eye out for rides that are too long and attracting grumbles from guests saying 'I want to get off'; that's a sign that they should have shorter durations.

-Make Sure Everything's Open and Accessible
Look on the ride and store summary pages for any rides you may have accidentally left closed or in testing mode. They won't be making money in that mode. Neither will they be if the path to them is broken or the queue line isn't connected. Your park inspector will eventually notice these problems but try and beat him to it before more potential money is lost.

-Scenery, Paths And Pre-Existing Rides Can Pay
If you are really tight on money, or have maxed out the loan and need a little bit more cash, try removing some pre-existing scenery if you think it isn't adding much to your park- the game pays you back some money. The same applies to paths to nowhere and even to big rides that come with the scenario at the start. Sometimes they are flawed or very unreliable (for example the Go Kart ride in 'Karts and Coasters' is so long your guests want to get off of it) and can pay off some impressively large amounts of money when demolished. That money can be used to make something more profitable, or even to instantly pay off the loan if that objective is the only one left to achieve.

-Passed the Objective? Sell it!
You can sell off an attraction you built to pass a scenario objective, especially if it was something that took up far too much space and chewed up money. This is most often the case with the VIP challenges; they will usually demand one specific thing (a fireworks display, certain animals) and change to a different thing for the higher level. This is best done when you pass Entrepreneur level and know exactly what is needed to pass Tycoon level. There's no use in demolishing, say, your ape enclosure and selling off your chimps at Entrepreneur level only to find you will need more chimps to pass Tycoon level.

-No Needless Loans
If you have a loan you need to be doing something with it, otherwise you are simply paying needless interest payments. Sometimes the interest rates are pretty whopping (29%) and for some reason your diligent park inspector is not keen to draw your attention to this hole in your finances. Guess he's not an accountant.

-Research
By default the research tab is on at the start of scenarios and set at $200 a month. Whether or not it needs to be is simply a case of opening the ride construction windows tabs and seeing what is available there to build. If there is hardly anything then keep the research budget high, and vice-versa - there's no need to spend money researching rides you won't be building. The big thing to look out for is what stalls are available, and especially whether the information kiosk, with it's maps and umbrellas, is there. If there is only a toilet block available to build then turn stalls research to maximum to make sure you have some food to sell when guests start getting hungry.

-Wages
As mentioned above it is cheaper in the long run to keep staff productive and happy by training them up for a one-time cost rather than paying them more money a month. Just be on the lookout for them thinking 'I'm worth more than this!' or your inspector reporting that a member of staff may quit. Then bumping up the salary is worth it to keep them working, especially in a larger park that is making good money.

-Fireworks
Fireworks ain't cheap. Each display costs money to stage. Sometimes VIPs demand fireworks so there's no option but to spend money to impress them, but if fireworks come with the scenario and aren't necessary then you can save funds by demolishing them.

- Buying Land/Building Rights
Land is expensive stuff, but worth it if you can build a big money-making coaster on it. Plan ahead earlier in the scenario and put more mundane rides in the existing land before expanding out onto the new land with a lavish new super coaster.

-Random Variables
Rain and breakdowns can knock your monthly takings down, sometimes significantly, so don't get too hung up on scrutinizing the balance sheet for individual months. Try and keep your more unreliable rides inspected more frequently, and make sure there are rides to tide your guests over while it's raining. The only scenario where rain is a real nightmare is the penultimate Soaked! scenario where it is raining half the time and you need $200,000 in ride tickets (just rides, not including pools). In this case you really just need to be patient and get lucky with a drier month.

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5; Tricky Terrain

One of the main problems facing you in scenarios isn't money or time - it's space. Buying land isn't always the answer because in some scenarios there won't be any for sale - at least not until the Tycoon level is passed. Some parks have barely any room for any rides at all, and very little flat land. All rides will cost more if they are built on elevated platforms, elevated walkways are surprisingly expensive too, and animal pens must be built on fairly flat ground - the animal house is annoyingly hard to for your keeper and animals to access if built near too many obstacles. However, with a little ingenuity the space can be made to work.

The levelling tool is an obvious friend - it can bulldoze away inconvenient hills and flatten those irritating little variations in height that stop paths connecting up properly, leaving billiard-table flat terraces to work with. On the flip side the hills can be a boon for roller coasters - building the tracks up and down the side of existing slopes saves on construction costs as the track does not need to be on expensive supports (plus a ground hugging coaster looks really cool).

With Soaked and Wild some of the problem was alleviated with the ability to build underground again like in the original RCTs (another retroactive feature that makes the original scenarios easier than they were originally) Underground coasters can be expensive and it's difficult to work out exactly where they are being placed (look for the ground squares above being highlighted) but they can free up space in parks where space is at a premium.

The animal enclosures in Wild provide an obstacle as the park paths cannot run through or over them. There is a clever trick demonstrated on the internet (look up www.ataricommunity.com/forums/showthread.php?t=509054 ) for running paths through the enclosures, but it is a complicated process. The simpler option is to tunnel the paths under the enclosures. Unfortunately paths do not automatically tunnel like rides so the terrain has to be stepped down to a square tunnel face for the path to slope down and run underground.

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6; Weather

Each scenario has its own specific weather patterns and there's nothing the player can do about it except to build information booths or umbrella stalls and build enough 'indoor' rides. Anything to stop the guests worrying about either the rain or the extreme heat - guests will use umbrellas as parasols if it's hot enough. The hot weather will make guests thirsty very quickly so drop in drinks stalls if the temperature is over thirty degrees. The roof scenery pieces can be used to create shelter, especially on queue lines, but it's not a neccessity. Annoyingly guests will often still stay away from some rides that seem to be entirely 'indoor' (like the aquarium) when it rains.

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7; 'La La Land'

The 'La La Land' level in RCT 3 involves having to impress the VIPs by building a firework display and then building two separate themed zones (Adventure and Sci-Fi) to "impress" them. The 'Park Opinion' bar in their stats must fill up fully for them to be suitably impressed. This seems like an onerous trial and error task but there is a quick way to do each;

If you can't get your head around the firework mixmaster (or can't be bothered) then there are some impressive saved displays out there on the good ol' interweb to use. To impress the VIP wait until dusk when the message 'XXX Firework Display is About to Begin' appears in the message tab, pick him up with the tweezers tool and plonk him on a path in front of the firework bases and let him watch. It shouldn't be too hard to impress him.

For the themed zone simply drop down one of the themed thrill rides on it's own and surround it with a path from the same theme that does not connect with other paths in the park. The swinging Pirate Ship (Adventure) and Flying Saucers ride (Sci Fi) are ideal for this. Then surround the path with a thick forest of themed trees; palms for adventure, the weird alien trees for sci fi. Then when the VIP arrives in the park pick them up and drop them into the isolated area and let them ride the themed ride over and over in a loop until they are 100% impressed (it may help to make the ride free to guarantee the VIP keeps riding) When they are impressed, pick them up and put them back in the rest of the park. When they finally leave the task should be accomplished.

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8; Challenges

In the Soaked and Wild scenarios there are additional achievements called challenges - usually involving selling items from shops, but occasionally asking for a roller coaster. The challenges are not essential to completing the scenario but provide a useful boost of money if completed. They can be postponed once if you are busy with something else but on the second request it's either accept or decline permanently. Whether or not you accept a challenge is really up to common sense. Some of the challenges will set a very ambitious target that looks tough to reach and can be a needless distraction. But if game asks for you to sell an easily reachable number of hats, or to build a coaster when you were about to anyway then the thousands of dollars you will be rewarded with are well worth the effort.

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9; Roller Coasters

Excitement

Many scenarios will demand roller coasters at a certain level of excitement, length and speed. Some of the optional challenges also request certain coaster attributes. Length and speed are fairly straightforward to meet provided you have some money - for speed simply select one of the launched coasters and set the launch speed above the requirement, or build a suitably large drop.

If you come up very slightly short on speed make sure the lift hill is set as fast as possible, or try changing the length of the train - a shorter train will effectively make the same drop longer and thus faster because there will be less of the train still on the lift hill when the front is over the crest.

A curiosity is the scenario that requests coasters of certain length but not exceeding a set speed. Most of the bigger coasters will struggle with this request so try using the slower ones like the Junior or the Side Friction rides in this case.

Coaster excitement is more of a black art than speed or length, (although achieving the targets still isn't nearly as frustrating as 'impressing' VIPs). Basically the excitement rating is the sum total of all of the different features of the coaster; drops, crests, corners, loops, corkscrews, helixes, twists, crossovers etc, plus surrounding scenery. Some coaster types have more components to build than others, and the more expensive coasters are generally easier to reach higher excitements than the more mundane types. The easiest option for the beginner is to run the coaster designer and open up some of the pre-made coasters and see how they do it. Practice makes perfect; five and six ratings are not too hard to reach, but a seven-excitement coaster will take a bit more ingenuity.

Landscaping, scenery, and the ride music can help push a coaster that is just below the required excitement over the line without having to change the ride itself. Plant a few trees, stick an animatronic by the track, put statuary next to the station, or raise up a little bit of land and make a small tunnel section in the ride.

Generally speaking more is better when it comes to excitement, and the only limit is when the rides intensity rating becomes too high and then the excitement takes a plunge. 'Intensity' is easier to quantify than excitement; it is the measure of speed and the g-forces exerted. The 'nausea' rating is less of a problem with most coasters; if the intensity is in acceptable range it is highly unlikely that nausea will be problem.

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Controlling Intensity

Intolerable G forces are the main cause for intensity being too high. Just one spike in G forces past about four g's will put the ride over the limit so keep an eye out on test runs for a section that is being taken too fast. There are some simple techniques to keep intensity under control and excitement high:

- Bank the turns: bank turns when possible as it reduces g forces.

- Reduce negative g: negative g's are the 'air time' over hill crests and the riders have far less tolerance to them than 'positive' g's (the g forces pushing down into the seats). If a train is flying over a crest far too quickly try raising the hill up.

- Inversions: most inversions should be taken at a reasonable speed to avoid extreme forces. Generally the ideal is to have the train run through in a smooth and graceful looking movement.

- Ease transitions: Moving straight from flat tracks to the steepest tracks can produce sudden spikes in G forces. Ease them by adding the intermediate slopes in between.

- Sudden direction changes: The ride will be more comfortable if sequences are taken in the same direction, for example a left corkscrew followed by a left helix.

- Brake blocks: brakes are useful for controlling speeds through loops and over crests, and to slow the train before the end of the ride if there are tight turns back into the station.

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Coaster Building In Scenarios

Any coaster saved in the coaster designer can be built in a scenario provided the particular ride has been researched, and plonking down a pre-built layout it is the easiest option, but it can be more cost-effective to custom build a coaster in the scenario. Using the existing landscaping and interweaving a coaster around and through the other rides can create a ride with high excitement for less money than building a pre-made coaster on an empty space. Plus the map may not have enough space to build one of the pre-built coasters.

The big problem in scenarios is that anything reasonably exciting is going to cost huge amounts of money to build, and will usually require a loan. For that reason the cheaper types of coaster are more practical for the early levels of scenarios than the glamorous types. The wild mouse, junior, corkscrew, steel looper, stand-up and wooden coasters can generate high excitement levels (and thus profits) without needing to max out the loan.

A problem with building coasters in scenarios with limited space for building is running out of room to properly finish off the circuit back to the station. Either by it being physically impossible to connect the track or not being able to fit in banked turns or a brake run and ending up with an intolerably fast tight hairpin into the station. For this reason it may be a good idea after building the station to build the last few turns of the layout first, thus ensuring that the circuit can be completed. Similarly in a crowded park build the queue lines and exit path and make sure they can be connected up properly before making the ride.

The 'ghost' train testing function is a must for scenarios since it runs when the timer is paused, preventing distractions while constructing, and making sure that the train has the momentum to make it through the ride without stalling.

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Roller Coaster elements

The coaster tutorials in the game provide a basic rundown of how to build a simple circuit ride, but there are many other possibilities to try. So much of the genius of RCT is how much complexity can come from such a simple construction system. Here is a selection of some of the more interesting tricks to employ when building coasters.

- Tester hills. Many real coasters have 'tester hills' - a very small drop followed by a flat section before the main drop - this takes the entire train off the lift hill before the drop. In real life it reduces the tension on the lift chain (not a problem in the game) and increases the speed of the first drop.

- Shuttle looper coasters. The most conventional coaster layout is a circuit but there is the 'shuttle' option. Either the train is launched out of the station or reverses out of the station and backwards up a lift hill and is then released at the top of the lift. The train runs through maneuvers (usually loops and corkscrews) and then up a very steep hill. At the top the train runs out of momentum and falls backwards to run back through the loops and back to the station. The major advantage of shuttle coasters is they get twice as many thrills from the same piece of track. A track with three loops will produce a ride with six inversions. The disadvantage is that they can only have one train.

- Underground coasters. A good way to get excitement and save precious park land is to run the coaster underground. The original RCT 3 couldn't support this function and Soaked had to have vertical faces in the land to allow rides underground but with Wild the ride construction will automatically run underground. The only hitch is that the game will build a cutting when it can rather than a tunnel so unsightly gouges in the landscape will be created rather than a nice neat tunnel if the land isn't deep enough.

- Ground-hugging hills. Lower the costs of construction by running the lift hills up the existing terrain. Useful for non-looping coaster types to add excitement by running them close to the ground and between scenery elements.

- Weave between rides. Unlike in real life parks health and safety regulations do not apply and the game will allow any ride to run through any other, allowing some surreal situations to be created; crazy golf courses running through the middle of coaster loops; aqua-blaster water slides doing tours of the park; paths running parallel to lift hills.

- Mid ride lift hill. The lift hill doesn't have to be at the start of the ride. With a raised station the train can roll down into an immediate drop and through various elements before reaching a lift hill later in the ride.

- Compound maneuvers. The half loop, twist and corkscrew pieces can be combined to create some dizzying combinations; cobra rolls, batwings, Immelmanns, pretzel loops etc.

- Interlocked loops. One of the coolest looking elements can be created by running two vertical loops through each other at different levels and at right angles.

- Interlocked corkscrews. Similar to the interlocked loops, the corkscrews can interlock if placed correctly.

- Loops around the station. The station has enough clearance to run vertical loops right around it.

-'Headchoppers'. As the name suggests any point where the track dives underneath another section, creating an alarming sense of an impending collision.

- Racing coasters. The 'synchronize with adjacent station' option is there to run two coasters parallel with each other. The trick to a successful racer is to stop one track getting too far ahead of the other. Do this by trying to equalise the number of times each coaster has to take the longer route round corners.

- Moebius/Continuous track racing coasters. Rather than having two separate coasters next to each other, one coaster can loop back to a second station parallel to the first one, and then around a second circuit and back into the end of the original station, thus creating a 'moebius'/figure eight/continuous loop. Just make sure the track has two trains, let the first one run round to the second station and then it will race the second train. In the few real continuous track racers the necessary crossover between the tracks occurs just after the station and before the lift hill.

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Coaster Types

Just about every major real-world roller coaster type is represented by an equivalent ride in the game. The developers were comprehensive and included many similar rides as built by competing manufacturers. As a result there is plenty of overlap between the various types.

Compared to RCT 1 & 2 the 'Change car' tab is more realistic in RCT 3; instead of switching between radically different classes of ride cars RCT 3 separates rides with identical tracks but different classes of cars into completely separate coasters. The 'Change cars' tab now more correctly switches between different car styling, although these styles do have differing attributes and will run on the ride in slightly different ways (for example the aeroplane cars on the Suspended coaster are heavier than the other cars).

Some coasters are more useful for scenarios than others because they will appear by default and won't need researching, some are definitely cheaper than others, but most have unique features that others do not have.

Included are the names of the most famous examples of real coasters of that particular type and some other interesting little factoids to explain the history of each design.

    Air Powered Vertical Coaster
An idiosyncratic high speed ride with rubber-tyred trains that only has vertical towers, an n-shaped tower top and banked corners. Layout possiblites are limited given the small variety of elements and the intolerable forces created if the train runs over the crest too fast. Can also only have one train. In real life it was something of a technical dead-end but this is still a useful high intensity and high speed ride in scenarios.
-Real Life Famous Coasters:
- Dodonpa (Japan). The only one of the type now running.
- Hypersonic XLC (King's Dominion, defunct)

    Bobsleigh
Free running cars in a train running in a U-shaped track or an O-shaped tunnel. Cars are loose so can fly off the track if crests are too abrupt.
- Avalanche (Blackpool)

    Compact Inverted Coaster
A smaller and cheaper version of the Inverted coaster with 2-across seating rather than four. The face-to-face cars from the previous games are now used on the identical Inverted Shuttle Coaster.

    Corkscrew Coaster
The ubiqitous 1980s steel coaster, and for a good reason; it is relatively cheap and has a number of different pieces. Makes for good value for money and compact layouts that are ideal for scenarios. No longer being constructed but many are still running around the world and will be for the foreseeable future, despite many being notoriously rough running.
- Loch Ness Monster (Busch Gardens Williamsburg)
- Corkscrew (1980 Alton Towers)
- Python (Busch Gardens Tampa)
- Great American Scream Machine (Six Flags Great Adventure)
- Viper (SF Great Adventure)
- Manhattan Express (Las Vegas)
- Ninja (Six Flags over Georgia)

    Dingy Slide
A water flume ride that does not need to be connected to a pool complex, because it is from the original game and predates Soaked!. With the add-on pack simulating water park slides the Dingy Slide can represent the compact slides found in fairgrounds and at seasides.

    Floorless Roller Coaster
One of the four variants of what was the Steel Twister coaster in RCT 1 & 2. The others in RCT 3 being the Stand Up Twister, Hyper Twister and Twister Coaster. As the name suggests the cars are sit-down cars without floors.
- Kraken (Sea World, Orlando)
- Medusa (SF Discovery Kingdom)

    Flying Coaster
Similar to the lay-down coaster but with the cars in the flying position in the station.
- Sadly an unfixed bug makes this coaster produce some very low excitement ratings considering the layouts. Build the lay down coaster instead, that works properly.
- Air (Alton Towers)
- Superman: Ultimate Flight @ Six Flags over Georgia

    Flying Turns
A very old-fashioned type of thrill ride from the early 20th century, contemporary with the Side Friction and Virginia Reel. Flying turns were invented and patented by an entrepreneur named John Bartlett and many were built around the USA in the 1920s. Recently resurrected with some modern copycat rides. Similar to the Bobsled Coaster but with a wooden track and only individual cars.
- La Vibora @ Six Flags over Texas
- Bobbaan @ Efteling

    Giga Coaster
One of the largest and fastest conventional coasters in the game. The giga coaster has no inversions and relies on breathtaking high speed drops, crests and turns. Also has a unique cable lift hill that is bit fiddly to implement but gives the train lots of momentum down the first drop.
- Millennium Force (2000 Cedar Point)
- Superman – Ride of Steel @ Six Flags America
- Goliath @ Six Flags Holland
- Desperado (Buffalo Bills Resort, Nevada)

    Heartline Twister Roller Coaster
A tubular ride developed by the Japanese TOGO company in the 1980s, with a car running in the centre of the tube barrel-rolling perfectly about their centres - only the Pipeline coaster can also do this. Doesn't have any corners but uses transfer junctions to create a circuit.
- Ultra-Twister (Six Flags Astroworld), closed with Astroworld in 2005.

    Hyper Coaster
A version of the corkscrew coaster that can be built to far greater heights. The immediate predecessor of the Giga Coaster, and usually providing a somewhat rougher ride. Has it's own unique loop - the figure eight roll.
- Magnum XL200 (1989 Cedar Point), first coaster over 200ft tall.
- Pepsi Max Big One (1994 Blackpool)
- Phantom’s Revenge  Kennywood Park
- Steel Force  Dorney Park
- Steel Dragon 2000 (Nagashima Spaland), the longest steel coaster in the world.

    Hyper Twister Roller Coaster
The non-inverting variant of the Twister coaster. Essentially a cheaper version of the Giga Coaster as it can do big drops and high speed fully banked turns.
- Apollo’s Chariot (Busch Gardens Williamsburg)
- Nitro (SF Great Adventure)
- Raging Bull (SF Great America)

    Inverted Coaster
The now-standard design around the world for 'feet dangling' coasters with four-wide seating and lots of different pieces to use. If it can be afforded its a good coaster to use to make a 7-plus excitement coaster in scenarios.
- Batman The Ride (1992, SF Great America), the first Inverted coaster.
- Alpengeist (1996, Busch Gardens Williamburg)
- Raptor (1994, Cedar Point)
- Montu (1996, Busch Gardens Tampa)
- Nemesis (1994 Alton Towers)
- Top Gun/Flight Deck (1993 Great America)

    Inverted Hairpin Coaster
Effectively a suspended wild-mouse coaster, with all of the various wild-mouse pieces available.
- Flying Coaster (Elitch Gardens)

    Inverted Impulse Coaster
An inverted coaster with a powered launch. Can only turn on vertical twists and has limited scope for track layouts.
- V2: Vertical Velocity (SF Marine World)
- Wicked Twister (Cedar Point)

    Inverted Shuttle Coaster
Identical to the compact inverted coaster but with unique 'face to face' cars where riders sit in pairs looking at each other.
- Two Face: The Flip Side (Six Flags America)
- Invertigo (Paramount’s Great America)

    Inverted Vertical Shuttle
The compact inverted coaster but with four person cars, making it almost identical to the Inverted Coaster, except this coaster can run on vertical hills.
- Déjà vu (Six Flags over Georgia, Magic Mountain, and Great America)

    Inverted Wild Mouse Roller Coaster
A wild mouse coaster than can build tracks past 90 degrees angle and run upside-down on the underside of the track.

    Junior Coaster
A cheap and useful coaster for building rides in the early stages of scenarios as it is nearly always available without needing to be researched. Cannot go very high but has a convenient space-saving curved lift hill.

    LIM Launched Coaster
LIM means 'Linear Induction Motor' coaster. Uses the same magnetic technology as the Reverse Freefall but in a conventional coaster. Only has a powered launch out of the station, and doesn't have a lift hill. Can be useful for beating required speed marks without resorting to the super-high speed coasters.
- Flight of Fear (Paramount’s Kings Dominion)
- Joker’s Jinx (Six Flags America)

    Lay Down Roller Coaster
The next development of the inverted coaster, with cars that lay down flat in the station. The ride can either create stomach churning lay-down inversions or 'flying' suspended rides, depending which way up it is.
- Stealth (Paramount’s Great America)
- Batwing (Six Flags America)

    Log Flume
The basic water ride with riders hanging onto the handles on the flume logs while dropping down steep slopes.

    Looping Roller Coaster
The original steel-looping coaster from the 1970s, the first common steel coasters that eventually took over from wooden rides. Quite cheap to make with a good variety of pieces, although a bit old fashioned-feeling compared to more advanced rides. Sadly the distinctive and historically accurate loop with boxy support towers this coaster had in original RCT games is missing in RCT3.
- Revolution (1976, SF Magic Mountain)
- Mind Bender (1978, Six Flags over Georgia)
- Shockwave (Six Flags over Texas)

    Mine Ride
Not strictly a coaster but a powered ride with mine train theming.
- Runaway Mine Train (Alton Towers)

    Mine Train Roller Coaster
A steel coaster with wooden support towers and mine train themed cars. Works best when diving underground making a 'Runaway Train' style ride.
- Gold Rusher (SF Magic Mountain)
- Runaway Train (SF Great Adventure)
- Dahlonega Mine Train (SF over Georgia)

    Mini Coaster
The Junior coaster with more ride elements - including a 95 degree drop - and two person 'rocket' styled cars. Unfortunately it doesn't have the space-saving circular lift hill like the Junior coaster.
- Black Hole (Alton Towers)
- Skull Mountain (Six Flags Great Adventure)

    Mini Suspended Coaster
Identical to the Suspended Coaster but with small single person chairs instead of cars. Stick trees around the track to add excitement for the riders.
- Birdman (Fuji-Q-Highlands)

    Mini Suspended Flying Coaster
Identical to the Suspended Coaster but with small flying suspended cars.
- Pteranodon Flyers (Islands of Adventure)
- Batflyer (Lightwater Valley)

    Multidimension Coaster
A steel ride with cars that can rotate the riders round 360 degrees in their seats, creating dizzying combinations, such as a feet-first vertical drop or a loop coordinated with the seat rotation to hold the riders vertical all the way through.
-X2 (Cedar Point)

    Pipeline Coaster
A corkscrew coaster with the train in the centre of a U-shaped track. The only conventional track coaster that can perform 360 degree heartline barrel rolls (the Heartline twister does not turn corners).

    Rafts
More of a transit ride than a coaster, river raft cars run in a water channel.

    Reverse Freefall Coaster
A real money-maker if you have researched it. The Freefall coaster is uses magnets on the horizontal pieces to launch the car up a vertical tower where it stops and falls back down - giving riders a few moments of weightlessness at the apogee of the tower. It does nothing else but visitors seemingly cannot pay enough to ride it. For double income place two side by side and sychronise the launch.
- The Escape (SF Magic Mountain)

    Reverser Coaster
A real rarity. Only one was ever made in real life and that was in 1914 (The 'Hooper Reverser' in Salt Lake City). It's a very basic wooden coaster but has cars built like railway cars with bogies that are spun around 180 degrees on ingenious reverser sections. The cars can run backwards in the stations so the next circuit begins backwards.
- Hooper Reverser (The only one ever built)

    River Rapids
A water channel ride with various pieces to help make the riders as wet as possible. The cars are circular rafts that are bumped and jostled down the ride.

    Side Friction Coaster
The most basic kind of coaster, and the oldest type in the game. The wooden side friction predates the invention of the three point under and side track wheels on later, faster coasters. Because it's cheap the Side Friction is useful in scenarios when money is tight, and guests don't notice either it's antiquated design or nostalgic appeal.
- Leap-The-Dips at Lakemont Park, Pennsylvania (built 1902) the last American Side Friction coaster left.

    Spinning Wild Mouse
Looks like the most nauseating ride in the whole game but in practice it doesn't seem to produce much more vomit on the paths than any other coaster. The cars spin and stop spinning after rolling over toggle track pieces.
- Crazy Mouse (South Pier, Blackpool)
- Magic Mouse (Pleasurewood Hills)

    Spiral Coaster
A version of the junior coaster where three riders sit in a line in cosy-looking tobaggan cars. Another good vintage-looking ride for creating a period-piece park.
- Jumbo Jet (Coney Island)
- Tornado (La Feria Chapultepac Magico)

    Splash Boats
A mid-price flume ride, grander than the log flume but made somewhat redundant by the Giant Flume introduced in Soaked.

    Stand-Up Coaster
The cheapest kind of Stand-up coaster based on the first coasters of this type that appeared in the 1980s. Similar to the corkscrew coaster but with higher intensity as the riders are not sat in relatively comfortable cars. Useful for making high excitement coasters in compact spaces.
- King Cobra (King's Island) defunct
- Shockwave (King's Dominion)
- Iron Wolf/Apocalypse (SF America/SF Great America)

    Stand-Up Twister Coaster
A much more advanced and expensive stand up coaster. Identical track to the Hyper Twister and Floorless coasters but with four-abreast stand up cars.
- Mantis (Cedar Point)
- Riddler's Revenge (SF Magic Mountain)
- Georgia Scorcher (SF over Georgia)

    StrataCoaster
The fastest and tallest coaster of the lot - it can climb to 400 feet and run over 120 mph, but it can't do much more than climb a vertical tower and vertical twist, and over the so called 'Top Hat' crest. The RCT 3 ride is based on the Top Thrill Dragster at Cedar Point, hence the dragster cars. That ride has been surpassed by the similar Kinga Ka at Six Flags Great Adventure. Needless to say it unlikely that any Kingda Ka recreations will be built during scenario play.
- Kingda Ka (SF Great Adventure)
- Top Thrill Dragster (Cedar Point)

    Suspended Roller Coaster
The forgotten innovator of the coaster world. The Suspended coaster appeared in the early 1980s and pre-dated the Inverted coaster by a decade but has now been largely eclipsed by the more advanced type. However the suspended design is still common around the world's parks. The track layout needs lots of turns to provide the G-forces to keep the cars swinging out. The many different cars of this coaster all have different weights and can alter the speed of the ride significantly.
- Ninja (SF Magic Mountain)
- Big Bad Wolf (Busch Gardens Williamsburg, defunct)
- Air Race (Bobbejaanland Family Park) - the model for the plane cars
- Vampire (Chessington Worlds of Adventure), the only coaster with swinging seat cars.

    Tilt Coaster
Based on a real ride in Taiwan, is a corkscrew coaster with a special additional piece - the thrill lift; a giant lift that carries the train up and then swings it round and releases it down a vertical track. That's pretty much all that's different but the lift does make a striking prescence on the skyline of a park.
- Gravity Max (Discovery World, Taiwan)

    Twister Coaster
A large, very cool looking steel coaster ride with many kinds of different elements that can be built to great heights. The Floorless Coaster and Standup Twister Coaster are the fancy variants of this coaster. (It was called the Steel Twister in RCT 1 & 2)
- Kumba (Busch Gardens Tampa)
- Dragon Khan (Universal’s Port Aventura)
- Incredible Hulk (Islands of Adventure)

    Vertical Roller Coaster
Based on the Alton Towers 'Oblivion' ride, the first coaster to have a vertical drop. Nothing particularly special about this ride now that other types can have vertical sections too, except it has the pre-drop holding brake that holds the car stationary above a drop before releasing it down. For maximum effect dangle riders above a drop that disappears underground.
- Oblivion (Alton Towers)
- Griffon (BG Williamsburg)

    Virginia Reel
Another vintage ride that is statistically inferior to more advanced designs - there's little need for it if the wild mouse is available - but adds some historic charm to a park. Once a common attraction in parks and on piers but now sadly extinct - the last one closed in Blackpool in 1982,

    Water Coaster
A water flume-like steel coaster with tracks that can run in water troughs.

    Wild Mouse Coaster
The big advantage of the Wild Mouse coaster is that it can turn tighter turns and transition from flat to steep slopes in one square, so it can fit into much tighter spaces. It's quite cheap too so a good wild mouse layout can be an invaluable aid to winning many scenarios. The key to the wild mouse is sudden changes of direction and taking the riders by surprise by dropping their world out from under them. It is still possible to create 'Ultra-Extreme' wild mouses though, so don't get too carried away.

    Wooden Roller Coaster
The most common and durable coaster of them all, the classic wooden coaster has lasted all the way through the 20th century and lives on in the 21st with new state-of-the-art computer designed rides. Until the 1960s it was pretty much the only kind of roller coaster, only being usurped in popularity by steel looping coasters in the mid 1970s.
There are several common types of wooden coaster designs. The most well famous is the classic seaside 'Big Dipper'; a coaster with many drops and crests, and slower unbanked turns, built either in an 'out-and-back' L-shape or in a figure of eight shape. Then there are  'Twister' types, where the cars twist through swirling curved drops and crests. Rarer is the side-by-side 'Racer' - either two separate tracks or one continuous track that crosses itself. Some more rural parks have wooden coasters that are built through woods and along the terrain. The latest generation wooden coasters combine all elements; big dipper drops and high g-force turns to create giant super wooden coasters.
When building a wooden coaster, try to get in either as many intense turns or high 'air time' crests as possible, and it will easily match the excitement of the steel rides.

Big Dippers:
- Coney Island Cyclone (1927) probably the most iconic roller coaster in the world, operating within sight of Brooklyn. Has inspired many copycat designs of it's figure-eight shape with a central lift hill surrounded by the rest of the ride.
- Coney Island Thunderbolt (192?) the twin of the Cyclone a few blocks away, closed in 1982 and controversially demolished in 2000.
- Blue Streak (Cedar Point)
- Phoenix (1946 - moved to Knoebels Park in 1985)
- Comet (Great Escape) - once the Crystal Beach Cyclone (below), then remodelled as the Crystal Beach Comet, and moved to a new park when Crystal Beach closed.

Twisters:
- The legendary 1920s coasters built by Harry Traver around North America were hybrid wooden track coasters with steel supports. Famously extreme at the time, they are all gone now: The Crystal Beach Cyclone, Palisades Cyclone, Revere Beach 'Lightning', and Oaks Park 'Zip!'
- Aeroplane Coaster (Rye Playland, defunct)
- Mr. Twister (Elitch Gardens, now remodelled as Twister II when Elitch Gardens moved)

Racers:
- Grand National (Blackpool)
- Racer (Kennywood)
- The Cyclone Racer (Long Beach, defunct)
- American Eagle (SF Great Adventure)

Terrain Coasters:
- Beast @ Paramount’s Kings Island
- Boulder Dash (Lake Compounce)

Super Wooden Coasters:
- Mean Streak (Cedar Point)
- Son of Beast (King's Island)
- Texas Giant

    Wooden Wild Mine
Similar to the steel wild mouse but with a more appropriate theme if you want to create an Indiana Jones style runway mine cart ride. Definitely improved by tunnelling underground too.
- King Solomon’s Mines @ Pleasureland Southport

    Wooden Wild Mouse
The original type of wild mouse, now almost completely superseded by steel wild mouses. But goes well with the Virginia Reel and Wooden Coaster for creating a vintage section of a park.
- Wild Mouse (Blackpool) one of the last Wooden Wild Mouses, built in the 1950s and a legendarily rough experience.

Soaked! expansion pack:

    Alpine Coaster
A simple steel coaster with small one-person tobaggan cars. In real life these cars  have a brake that can be controlled by the rider, but in the game that feature is absent.

    Giant Flume
A very big flume ride with a way higher capacity than the cheapo Log Flume.

    Glider Coaster
A flying coaster with a funky-looking circular lift hill. Can only have individual cars and not trains.

    Half-Pipe Coaster
A themed impulse shuttle designed to look like a giant skateboard on a half-pipe ramp. As silly as it sounds it's quite a useful ride to place down when space is tight and it makes a tidy profit.

    Hershey's Stormrunner
Licensed recreation of the Hersheypark Stormrunner, a ride like the LIM launched coaster but with some unique inversions.

    Roller-Soaker
A gentle steel coaster with the unique gimmick of being able to drop tanks of water on guests on paths below.

    Sea Serpent Shuttle
The only coaster that comes with decorative additions. Basically a shuttle looping coaster that looks like a large sea monster. Appears ready built in the Loch Ness Monster scenario.

    Sky Rider
A suspended coaster with riders sitting in seats facing each like at a dining table, and a vertical elevator lift hill.

    Turbo Bikes
Yet another steel corkscrew coaster but this time with motorcycle cars and a powered launch.
- Mick Doohan's Motocoaster

    White Water Rapids
A much more realistic looking version of the River Rapids included in the Soaked! expansion. The river trough has more water features and can be wider.

Wild! expansion pack:

    Coasterball
An inverted impulse coaster with multi-dimension cars and large circular drop pieces.
- Green Lantern First Flight (SF Magic Mountain)

    Dizzy Dropper
Another variant of the wild mouse coaster. This time the track is laid on it's side and cars run on the side with vertical seating, creating dizzying feet first drops.

    Drifting Coaster
A steel coaster with cars that swing out at the back and 'drift' out around the corners.

    Extended Coaster
The developers present to the coaster nerds - the extended coaster is the steel twister coaster but with all the lastest trick pieces from the most advanced rides in the world currently.

    Robotic Coaster
Taking the concept of the Multi Dimension Coaster another step forward with riders held on a robotic arm that can be programmed to perform all kind of maneouvers. A theoretical design that has not been built for real - yet.

    Rotating Tower Coaster
Yet another variant on the lift hill. The rotating tower places different trains on separate sections of track simulataneously.

    Spinning Steel
Identical to the Stand Up coaster but with spinning cars.

    Splitting Coaster
Creates instant racing coasters by splitting the track and the train straight down the middle to run on separate tracks before re-combining again. Does not exist in real life except as a conceptual idea. The recombining action would be extremely hard to implement at high speed.

    Towering Coaster
Very like the Vertical Drop coaster but with a vertical lift and a drop that can run past 90 degrees and round upside down.
- G Force (Drayton Manor)


In Transport Rides:

    Steeplechase Ride
This transport ride is really a vintage form of roller coaster that was popular in the 1920s. Riders ride on horse cars over small hills and dips. In real life these rides would be arranged with many tracks next to each other and run in a large rectangular course. One of these rides still exists at Blackpool Pleasure Beach.
- Steeplechase Park, Coney Island had a 5-track steeplechase ride as it's centrepiece in the 1930s.

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Water Rides:

Water slides must be connected to pool complexes with the staircase pieces - usually the spiral stairs - but can then roam off round any part of the park just like roller coasters. The slides must end in a suitably large pool or the park inspector will close them down until you provide a safe landing zone.

    Aqua Blaster Slides
The nearest thing to a water slide roller coaster. Unlike the standard water slide the Aqua Blaster has a 'lift hill' - a high pressure sheet of water that 'blasts' the riders up hills. As a consequence the Aqua Blaster can be a match for roller coasters for length and excitement levels.

   Water Slide
The water slide may be basic but it can be extremely hair raising. Try copying the practice of real parks and put increasingly extreme slides next door to each to other so your pool guests can decide how scared they want to be.

  H2o Bowl
The H2o ride is a waterslide with an insane giant funnel bowl that deposits sliders back into the pool. The giant funnel is extremely fun to watch on the rider cam.

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Roller coaster Record Stats:

Opening the stats tab will bring up the vital statistics of your rides - speed, drops, forces, length etc. For the purposes of comparision with any rides you may build in RCT 3, here are the real world roller coaster records:

Tallest:
Kingda Ka - 456ft/139m

Drop:
Kingda Ka - 418ft/127m

Tallest (Wood):
Son of Beast - 218ft/66m (standing but not running)
Colossus (Heide Park) - 196ft/60m

Drop (Wood):
Son of Beast - 214ft/65m (standing but not running)
El Toro - 176 ft/54m

Tallest Inversion:
Volcano The Blast Coaster - 155ft/47m

Tallest Loop:
Superman Krypton Coaster - 145ft/44m

Speed:
Formula Rossa - 150mph/240kph

Speed (Wood)
Son of Beast - 78mph/126.2kph (standing but not running)
Colossus (Heide Park) - 74.6mph/120.1kph

Steepest:
Takabisha - 121 degree drop

Steepest (Wood):
T Express - 77 degree drop

Longest:
Steel Dragon 2000 - 8133ft/2479m

Longest (Wood):
The Beast (Kings Island) - 7359ft/2243m

Most inversions:
Collosus (Thorpe Park) - 10
Tenth Ring Coaster - 10

Most roller coasters:
17 - Six Flags Magic Mountain, Cedar Point

Most inversions in park:
35 - SF Magic Mountain