Busch Gardens Williamsburg - Monster Coaster Plans For 2020

After a lengthy period of leaks that latest information to leak out regarding the mega coaster planned for Busch Gardens Williamsburg in 2020 paints an impressive picture. Since 2017 the coaster has been referred to on internal documents as “Project Madrid” and BGWFans have been on the forefront of digging up all the latest and greatest information on this project.
From what they are reporting the plan is now simply for a new coaster, and will not include include a new land theme to “Spain” or anything. (Or at least not right now, you never know, they could add stuff around the ride in a future project…) If you scroll down on their project update you’ll see their best guess as to the coaster’s layout, based on the location of the various footers marked on a project map. Based on this guess-work, the coaster appears to have an initial launch section near the start of the ride, and then an interesting second launch zone in mid ride that appears to use a rapid track switch system that will activiate after the train passes into the launch area to ‘switch’ so that the train will hit some kind of hill without enough speed to make it over, roll-back through the launch zone again, over the switch and backwards up a large spike track for a brief freefall moment before plunging down again into the launch zone a third time where it will get the full boost needed to make up over and over that large hill or top-hat element. From there will come the biggest drop of the entire ride, as the train will plunge from it’s highest point down the cliff edge of the Rhine River for a near-brush with the water’s edge before before climbing back up the cliff to complete the rest of the ride’s high-speed layout.
Intamin is making almost the exact same style mid-ride shuttle-launch zone for a project announced for Parc Asterix in 2021, and actually starts off the Soaring With Dragon coaster in China with this same style launch system concept too. With that in mind, I’m guessing this also adds more credit the rumor from last fall that indicated that Intamin was behind this new coaster as well.