Disney Named Both Piston Peak Rides at Magic Kingdom: Cars Ridge Run Rally and Miss Fritter's Daredevil Spin-Along

Piston Peak National Park has had two announced attractions for two years and no names for either of them. Coverage, ours included, has been calling them the off-road rally race and the family attraction. At D23 on Saturday, Disney retired both placeholders.

Michael Hundgen, vice president creative for Walt Disney World, and Imagineer Jason Grandt took the Horizons: A Carousel of Progress stage to name them. Cars Ridge Run Rally is the headliner. Miss Fritter's Daredevil Spin-Along is the second ride, shown and described publicly for the first time.

Quick facts: Both rides sit inside Piston Peak National Park, the Cars themed land taking shape in Frontierland at Magic Kingdom. Disney calls the project part of the largest expansion in Magic Kingdom's history. Neither attraction has an announced opening date.

Cars Ridge Run Rally

Grandt framed the ride as a hunt for "the wildest racer in the wheelderness," with cars competing for the "fastest lap in the west." He walked the course beat by beat: a climb up Piston Peak to an icy, snow covered mountaintop, a plummet into a camelback descent, a run through a geyser field, then a loop around the Old Tankfull geyser and a sprint to the finish, where Lightning McQueen and Mater call the race live on the Racing Sports Network.

Grandt said the moment he is most looking forward to is the frosty summit at night.

The ride system is the actual news

The names are the headline, but the more consequential claim was about hardware. Hundgen said Cars Ridge Run Rally will debut a completely new ride vehicle, designed not to simulate an off-road car but to be one, and that guests will "feel every bump, drop, and rock because this vehicle's tires and suspension are truly driving over and reacting to them."

That lines up with the full scale foam mockup Imagineering showed on the expo floor a day earlier, which came with hard numbers: 32 inch wheels, a 96 inch wheelbase, six seats, and no doors or windows. Panelists described that mockup as the last step before the vehicles go into production.

One clarification is worth making, because Disney's wording invites a bigger read than it supports. Reporting from the same expo floor described the vehicle running on a single rail, with a range of motion comparable to Indiana Jones Adventure or the retired DINOSAUR. The claim is that the tires and suspension genuinely absorb the terrain, not that the cars steer freely across open ground. The vehicle is still guided. What is new is that the bumps underneath it are real.

Fans also got a look at the whole project as a 225 square foot scale model at the Imagineering: Horizons pavilion, the same model that turned out to hide four tributes to Tom Sawyer Island. Hundgen said construction progress is "fully underway."

Miss Fritter's Daredevil Spin-Along

The second ride is the one that had never been described in any detail. Hundgen said it will feature Miss Fritter, the "Diva of Demolition" from Cars 3, as a "huge school-bus-sized animatronic" hosting a stampeding bash at her "wildest demolition derby yet."

The name also settles a question the placeholder left open. Spin-Along points to a spinner, which fits the concept art: small car vehicles circling a derby arena strung with lights and burning barrels while Miss Fritter presides over the whole thing from a platform.

What Disney did not say

There is no opening date for either ride, and no phasing for the land, which matters because Piston Peak is one piece of a Magic Kingdom expansion that also includes Villains Land. Disney also gave no height requirements, no ride durations and no hourly capacity figures. For a rally ride whose entire selling point is that the suspension is real, the height minimum is the number worth waiting for.

Source: Disney Parks Blog, Two Piston Peak Rides Coming to Magic Kingdom Announced at D23.