Mandrill Mayhem

Mandrill Mayhem is the headline attraction within World of Jumanji, the Jumanji film franchise themed land at Chessington World of Adventures.

The ride is a family-sized version of Bolliger and Mabillard's Wing Coaster design, and the first to feature a shuttle backwards-and-forwards style layout rather than the usual full circuit variety. It is also the first rollercoaster at Chessington to feature an inversion, with riders being turned upside down through an inline twist over World of Jumanji's entrance gateway.

Although the addition of an inversion makes it seem intimidating, Mandrill Mayhem is aimed at Chessington's young family target market. It sits nicely within World of Jumanji, with the track circling the perimeter of the area and culminating in a twisting spike which winds itself around a huge Jaguar Shrine statue down at the far end.

The wing coaster trains have riders sitting on pairs of seats spread out alongside the track, rather than on top. They train has been well themed as a row of Mandrill monkeys complete with brightly coloured faces, their arms outstretched to hold each "wing" of riders.

Thanks to its shuttle design the rollercoaster forgoes a lift hill in favour of a Linear Synchronous Motor (LSM) launch system, which initially sends the train backwards out of the station. After climbing part way up a beyond-vertical spike element (named a Junior Scorpion Tail), it falls back downwards and is accelerated by the LSMs forwards through the station to reach its top speed.

From there the train makes its way around the rest of the track, including through the inline twist which is taken quite slowly with plenty of hangtime. By the time it gets to the upward spiralling spike at the far end, there is quite some momentum which allows it to reach very close to the end of the track before falling down. This is especially impressive from the front seats and makes the heart race for a moment as you wonder whether it really will stop in time, unlike on many other shuttle coasters which stop much further from the end. Rolling back down the spike, the entire track is then navigated again in reverse.

In terms of ride experience itself, the rollercoaster gives a similar smooth ride to that which would be expected from B&M. However it is extremely bouncy, considerably more so than other B&M Wing Coasters, which although not rough can feel a bit uncomfortable. There's also an unfortunate hard bump as the train nears the station on the return run, almost as if it has hit a pothole in the track.

The main problem with Mandrill Mayhem lies not in the experience but in the choice of this type of coaster for a major theme park like Chessington. Given its shuttle design it has a limited capacity and a low throughput, meaning it struggles to cope with the volume of visitors that Chessington attracts.

To try and manage demand, the park have introduced a compulsory virtual queuing system for the ride. Instead of being able to walk up and join the main queue to ride, park guests must instead use their mobile phone to sign up for a "Reserve and Ride" account and then book a timeslot to ride. Given the low capacity, these timeslots are limited in number, and only a handful are released every few minutes throughout the day. This leads to visitors having to constantly check their phone until they have managed to grab one of the coveted slots, rather than focus on enjoying their day out.

Slots can be given out for times several hours into the future - two or three hours in some cases - meaning riders have a substantial wait to ride even after they have finally been able to make a reservation (although of course thanks to the virtual queue they are able to try out other attractions around the park while they wait). However, this is not the end of the queuing: Once the timeslot finally comes up, rider's reservation QR-codes are scanned at Mandrill Mayhem's entrance and they are then admitted to the main queue, which they could well be waiting in for a further hour before they actually board the ride. This is due in part to a seemingly ridiculous situation where riders are not allowed to wait behind the station airgates, so cannot enter the station until the previous train has returned and riders are being offloaded (and worse still for those on the right-hand side of the train, who are not even allowed to cross the bridge over to their side of the platform until the train is back). Together with some extremely lacklustre operations, this means at times it takes four or five minutes between dispatches of an already low capacity rollercoaster.

Mandrill Mayhem is good if nothing particularly spectacular: It is much as you might expect from a family rollercoaster. Sadly, selecting such a low capacity ride for a busy park like Chessington is a bonkers decision. Even with virtual queuing being used to try and fix the issue, the stressful slot booking and huge waiting times significantly contribute to ruining the overall experience it is trying to provide.

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