Bakunawa: Six Flags' Secret Coaster That Breaks 6 World Records
Six Flags Great Adventure has been teasing something under the codename "Project Purple" for months. No blueprints leaked. No construction photos surfaced. Just a single purple teaser image and a lot of speculation. Today, they pulled the tarp off, and it turns out the secrecy was warranted: the thing is absolutely unhinged.
Meet the Bakunawa — named after a serpentine moon-eating dragon from Philippine mythology — a coaster that doesn't just break records, it obliterates them. We're talking six world records on opening day:
- Most inversions: 10 inversions, shattering the previous record of 8 (held by The Smiler at Alton Towers).
- Most loops: 17 full loops across the entire layout. Seventeen.
- Tallest coaster structure: 456 feet at its peak — taller than the Statue of Liberty.
- Fastest dive drop: A 97-degree first drop pulling sustained negative Gs for a stomach-in-throat 4.5 seconds.
- Most track elements in a single ride: 38 distinct elements, including a subterranean tunnel section that drops 120 feet below ground level.
- Longest ride duration: 4 minutes 22 seconds from dispatch to brakes — an eternity in the coaster world, where most thrill rides wrap up in under two minutes.
The engineering behind it is bonkers. The track is a custom hybrid steel design from Rocky Mountain Construction (RMC), the same wizards who revived the wooden coaster industry. But Bakunawa goes further — it uses a magnetic launch system that accelerates the train from 0 to 90 mph in 3.2 seconds, then sends it into a subterranean trench carved 12 stories into the New Jersey earth. You spend a full 45 seconds of the ride underground, in the dark, hitting inversions you can't even see coming.
"We wanted to build something that would make people question whether it was even possible," said Six Flags' VP of Ride Engineering in the press release. "I think we succeeded."
The Bakunawa opens to the public on September 1st, and early rider reviews from media previews are calling it "the most intense coaster ever built" — not just in statistics, but in the relentless, unbroken assault on your senses from the moment the launch hits. No block brakes mid-course. No scenic lift hill breather. It's a four-minute, twenty-two-second sprint through a dragon's digestive tract.
I'll be there opening weekend. If you see a guy with a GoPro strapped to his head looking like he just survived a car crash, that's me. That's the Bakunawa smile.