Even with Compounce as my home park I only ever ride Wildcat when I’m with someone who’s never ridden it. People’s reactions when they first ride it are worth the pain.

The difference in quality between Lake Compounce’s two wood coasters is astounding!

I love the road that leads into lake compounce. You get mild ejector at 45mph on those hills

2:48 you don't even need to explain this coaster's roughness when they see that poor unfortunate soul in the back row. Like seriously, Wildcat looks so rough it's dangerous, and I can feel this guy's pain. I already hate the ride even though I've never been on it!

The sad music in the background 😂

I rode Wildcat with my (then) 13 year-old niece in 2010 and it was exceptionally painful - we both came off the ride with aches and pains. I had never experienced jack-hammering on a wooden coaster quite like it and I can't even imagine how it could be worse (but I'll take your word for it)!

I know they just had this ride re-done in 2017, but they should have it re-done again, this time by the Gravity Group. Give it Timberliner trains and completely re-track the layout so it can ride better again. Parc Asterix did the same thing with their CCI Woodie Tonnerre 2 Zeus, so this should be given the same treatment as well. If not, then just RMC it I guess.

That's actually really sad, and I bet you if GCI had done the work it would be butter smooth. But to spend that much money and have this result... that's the equivalent of coaster manslaughter! I remember reading about the re-track just before they began work, and I actually got excited that when I finally visited LC that I'd be able to enjoy the best version of wildcat! I'd not have had any idea had it not been for your video, so thank you for that.

4:52 look at the ejector in the back on that. That’s the best element on the ride. The coaster is bad, but that element alone makes it worth it for me. Very underrated ride

The trains are used as instruments of pain. Best quote ever!

I went to Lake Compounce recently and when I went on Wild Cat I wasn't screaming or anything I was just chanting "Get Me Off This Thing." When I got off I noticed there was a bruise the size of a football or a soccer ball on my leg.

I am in shock on how unbelievably miserable this ride is. Most people see that speed hill as a “ejector moment that saves the ride”, But it looks like and rides like a painful, zero airtime moment that jackhammers with no relent. Also, nice review!

I have never ridden Wildcat and I've always felt slightly ashamed of this because, you know, the thing is so picturesque and historic--you see it right there when you come into the park. But I have been WARNED and it just doesn't sound like the credit is worth it. And there's another wood coaster in the park that is so superior it's farcical.

4:50 it's so bad that you can see literally everyone on the train get yeeted to the side of the train ;w;

Now imagine if RCCA did a full retrack of this ride a la Coaster Express.

I really love the sad music in the background lol...so fitting. I've used that track myself

M&V did the retrack for this one...the same company responsible for the infamously rushed and bad initial 2007 trackwork of Boardwalk Bullet.

I'm impressed you could find anything positive to say about it. I rode this a couple of years ago and it's officially my least favorite wood coaster I've ever ridden. Such a pile of crap. Makes me wonder if RMC can work with a structure this old, that'd be the only way to fix the ride.

Lowkey one of the most rough coasters out there is Swamp Fox. Anyone that has ridden it recently can attest. It's a shame, because it used to be one of the most underrated classic woodies; nice airtime layout.

According to the comment of xandra "Was at the park today and there’s someone on the track with a drill so, who knows what they’re doing", the ride is still operating

It's such a shame because this looks like it would be a solid family woodie with proper tracking, and every park needs at least one solid family coaster.

In the early 1980s the ride was not to bad. Then again, I looked down from my seat and could see the track through a hole in the car floor. It badly needed the new trains that arrived a few years later when Hershey bought the park.

Holy cow! This must've been another one of m&v's tracking blunders like og boardwalk bullet. I'm a sucker for white wood coasters too.

4:18 That is the most insulting thing a coaster could ever hear. (However I guess Wildcat deserves it)

I rode this back in 2013, so it had the old PTC trains. It only ran one train, and the line was an hour. Not worth the wait. It was rough with plenty of jackhammering in the valleys, but was tolerable. I wasn't impressed with Lake Compounce as a whole, but if I ever went back there, I think I'd skip Wildcat and take some extra rides on Boulder Dash. It had less than half the wait time the day I went since it runs 2 trains which seat 24 passengers. I'm not sure how one could retrack a whole ride and end up with it being worse, but if I were Lake Compounce, I'd sue Martin and Vleminckx.

When the lift hill is more fun than the actual ride, you know there is something going wrong here. Lol

I’ve thought a number of wooden coasters were overblown in terms of roughness (Judge Roy Scream, GASM, Thunderhawk at Dorney, Hershey’s Wildcat) so I was expecting to have a similar reaction to this Wildcat. After the first couple of elements I was thinking “huh, this is fine”. Good lord does the rest of this ride stink. It’s my last favorite wooden coaster by a mile, nothing I’ve ridden so far comes close.

Even Boulder Dash gave me a giant bruise on the side of my chest, I can only imagine how much damage Wildcat would have done.

In July I went to a NAPHA event. Literally everyone quit after one ride during ERT, despite there being no wait. I rode in the front and was astonished how bad it rode!

i read on a recent Trip Advisory review that this coaster sent someone to the hospital because they got injured by how rough it was....😬😱

Yeah I live in Rhode Island and have a Season Pass to Lake Compounce cause it’s literally less than a 90 min drive and it’s a perfect day park if you do the water park too. Omg you are so right about WildCat. Only did the ride twice last summer and I’m not joking I got a back spasm after riding it and had to lay down in my car for 20 mins lol. It’s sad Cause the other 3/4 coasters it has are great I honestly think they should just get rid of it and add a brand new coaster or two

Wildcat in 2024 doesn’t match up with the opinions of this video. I rode it a few months ago for the first time and found it charmingly old school.

I rode it the year before the retracking, and I thought I had cracked my spine. I was happy about the retracking, but now I'm sad that it was done so poorly and that the park wasted its money. Not all old coasters are worth saving, but the solution isn't always RMC'ing, either. The best "solution" may be to hope that new owners of the future will do it right, as was done with the renovation of Collosus, the biggest wooden coaster in Germany, which was done well by Intamin.

I have never been on this ride but I have ridden a roller coaster with the old millennium fire trains. That ride was renegade at Valleyfair and I think those trains were perfect for that ride because it’s a little bumpy here and there but it’s very forgiving and the airtime you get is fantastic. I feel like these trains would be so much better for a wildcat to help you absorb the bumps

I love this review. At heart, “It’s like dating a beautiful person who treats you like trash” 😂

Out of the 81 coasters I’ve ridden, there are only 3 that I dislike, and Wildcat is one of them, it’s easily my least favorite coaster. I’d say I have a higher than average tolerance for roughness, but only if the ride pulls good forces. Not only is this ride forceless as hell, it’s also the roughest coaster I’ve been on. I first rode this thing when I was 7 going on 8, and as I commented in the Boulder Dash review, it was my first “adult” coaster and my first wooden coaster. The 50 minutes between riding this and Boulder Dash was the only time in my entire life that I disliked wooden coasters. I remember it being closed in 2012 for “extensive trackwork” and I was excited to ride it again the next summer. I came back in 2013 and was expecting a smoother ride experience, so you can probably imagine my disappointment when I realized that they had only retracked the section of track coming out of the second fan curve, and the rest of the ride was just as rough as before. There have been recent rumors of a Titan Track redo in the next few seasons, and I’m honestly curious about how they could possibly fuck this up, because all of their attempts to “refurbish” the ride in the past have all been a flop.

I would love to hear a coaster engineers opinion as to why this coaster can’t be smoothed out. Is it purely in the track work? Structural issues? It’s crazy that so many attempts were made to redo the track but it always results in a rough ride.

We need a new coaster RMC raptor or a S&S kind of like what Kennywood got with steel curtain but theme it to the Huskys give us some UCONN love. White tracks with a gray and blue trains

I’ve seen povs of how rough the valleys are at the bottom of the first turn around, and I had a headache just WATCHING how much it bounces up and down in that first valley and I was like dang I’m not even on the ride I’m only on KZfaq and I can feel headache coming. I’m just watching this.

How dare you say wildcat is bad we all love it

Needs RMC to retrack it. And PTC to supply the cars. I'm not saying demolish any part of structure. Only replace its track with its Signature Wooden track system. Only then it will be airtiming. At decent speeds.

Got to have soft padding like PTC trains on these killer woodies. Great America Scream Machine at SFOG I just rode a couple of days ago and it's padding saved it. Even though it was ridiculously brutal in the valleys, at least you get a little pop of floater on a few hills. That's what I hate about Arrow cars actually, no damn padding anywhere. Kills my spine as a skinny guy. I'll never visit a small park like this so doubt I'll ever get to experience it.

Many classic PTC wooden coasters were found by many enthusiasts to not be painful

I hated it too. I wondered if my judgment had been clouded by the fact that the line was 90 minutes on a Wednesday. I think a full queue is over an hour, as it was spilling out about 20 minutes beyond the queue entrance. But I see that it wasn't just the frustration of a huge crowd; that it would be just as terrible if it were a walk-on. I rank it 488th out of 494, with 3 old defunct coasters making up 6 of the ones behind it.

The fact that new trains are lower capacity and haven’t made the ride smoother made it a waste of buzz bar removal :(

they are fixing the tracks again, hopefully it gets somewhat better

Omg Wildcat was so rough, I almost considered NOT going on Boulder Dash. I don't do well on rough and intense wooden coasters, but Boulder Dash is a definite exception! 👌🏾 It's 100x better than Wildcat.

I'm a little bit skeptical on whether or not it actually recieved a full gci retrack because ghostrider has a different structure between the rails before and after the retrack. Most likely it was technically retracked, but gci replaced the bare minimum amount of wood.

People don’t usually make this comparison but how this coaster got retracked this is like when some people get botched plastic surgeries

Dude... You should do a ranking video of all the coasters you've ridden named Wildcat.

Cleveland should reopen Euclid Beach on the lake front. They could buy some of the old coasters from cedar point. Take corkscrew, Gemini, and whatever else they close. Since cedar point is on lake Erie you could relocate the rides using a boat. Would be far cheaper than relocating rides from other parks. And since euclidbeach would be on thr lake front you could just offload from the boat onto the property.

Wait until they start using the over the shoulder restraints They retracked the lift hill so you jolt up every second.

I don’t mind roughness, if it wasn’t for that this coaster would still have its glorious buzz bars.

I can't trust a coaster named Wildcat anymore, I went on Wildcat at Hersheypark and Lake Compounce, both rides were unbearably rough for me

This would have to get the RMC treatment. It’s just gonna need to happen.

How do they make so many bad decisions on the details of one coaster ?

That moment at 1:44 looks so sudden

Why couldn't GCI do the retracking instead? Especially since they gave it GCI trains.

Would you rather see this get RMCed or replaced? I know it doesn't have he potential to get RMCed and they most likely won't do that but I they could, which would you rather happen?

i'm not even gonna lie wildcat looks so bad it looks good. especially the first bunny hill. it looks like it would ride similar to the transition into the turn over the lake on raven. it was jackhammering and crazy laterals and i loved it. i'm sad it got retracked, so if wildcat is a bunch of that it looks low key fun

I haven't been to Lake Compounce, but the roughest coaster I've been on is a PTC: Thunderhawk at Dorney Park. I don't think this is a bad coaster. In fact, my mom says I have a very tough battle body. Would ya like to know an example?

This coaster should’ve had 12 car Millennium Flyer Trains

This is honestly so sad to me. Such a nice looking classic coaster. Sure the layout isn't much, but the layout lets it work as a nice intermediate starter coaster for younger thrillseekers. But it's ruined by the atrocious track work. I haven't ridden Wildcat, but it's honestly so surprising to me when this is how Lake Compounce's 1920's woodie runs, while my home park in the same chain (Kennywood) is able to keep THREE woodies from the 1920's super smooth for wooden coaster standards. Honestly I just wonder why they bothered to get GCI trains but not have THEM do the trackwork. I'm pretty sure gci would be able to do a MILES better job retracking it. You can literally see the kinks in the pov. Though I think that it's too iconic for the park to tear down, but too historic to rmc, and even if it did become RMC'd it probably would end up having a super short layout like Twisted Cyclone. So I feel like the best option is to put Titan track on it. They already have the GCI trains for it! Also another rare positive thing about this coaster: it was the first coaster Zonkers rode!!

This is definitely one of the worst coasters I've ridden, along with Wolverine Wildcat at Michigan's Adventure and Grizzly at King's Dominion. I didn't even consider giving them a second chance after obtaining the credit.

Never been on this coaster though I’d suggest this coaster should get some Titan Track. Despite how bad I’ve heard this ride is, I wouldn’t RMC or demolish this ride due to how old & “historic” it is.

dude you can even see the guy in the back wanting to die and not caring that he is being ejected. (4:57)

Which retracked sections of Boulder Dash at Lake Compounce did make the ride rougher? Was Boulder Dash still rougher than Wildcat?

Many wooden coasters that use Millennium Flyers trains were good and not painful, but...

All I know, wildcat could of gotten what I like to call the Dinn rough coaster curse.

I rode that coaster and OUCH! The drop is smooth but the rest of the course need to have a Black and White RMC Topper track to make it 100% smoother. If they freshened up this roller coaster, why is it even worse?

I'm now wondering like the coaster is insanely negatively recieved, will the park eventually decide to tear it down despite being a historic coaster?

Which Millennium Flyers trains did you like more, the older cushioned ones or the newer hard ones?

Did you like the orange rails and portions of the side walls?

Do you like the airtime in the road going into Lake Compounce? What airtimes did you prefer?

Lake compounce, if you’re watching this, please rmc this ride. You could possibly become one of the best theme parks in the usa

Possibly the only way to fix this is titan track...I have never seen you give a rating of 1.. so it really must be a shocking ride. EDIT: Just watched a back seat POV.. there IS no fixing this ride and Titan track would just be burning more money.. Layout is too boring.. demolish it and put a nice new gravity group compact in its place! Problem solved. Something like Roar o Saurus.

Yesterday, I was first train of the day on this piece of garbage, this needs to be rmcd

What do you think about: Wildcat at Lake Compounce Jungle Mouse at Hamanako Pal Pal Olandese Volante at Rainbow Magicland Goliath at Six Flags New England Apocalypse at Six Flags America Vampire at Walibi Belgium Blue Tornado at Gardaland Coaster Express at Parque Warner Madrid

Since this coaster has an ACE landmark, it just makes me sad of how jarringly rough this coaster is, part of the reasons why I shouldn't trust Martin & Vleminckx into re-tracking this coaster, GCI should've done it and re-retrack this ASAP!

The jackhammering made me feel like someone was repeatedly kicking me in the stomach

one my Bucket list Wooden Coaster

Just so I got this straight ... this is a *worse* coaster than that pirate-themed one at Casino Pier (with no pirates)?

I got on it this year first time since the retracking and new trains... Big yikes. Its terrible.

Your favorite coaster in the world was Wildfire at Silver Dollar City? Your least favorite coaster in the world was Zeus at Mt Olympus?

And with the old track and trains before 2017, did it have airtime?

I don’t think RMC is always the answer to rough wooden coasters. This is an ACE Landmark so it needs to be preserved. What I would do is put PTC trains back on the ride so there can be non-wheel seats and have GCI do a full retrack and make the hills provide more airtime. Classic PTC’s are underrated and I would love to make this run like one again.

Why do enthusiasts like Millennium Flyers? The lap bars go down by themselves and you can’t have any room for airtime. Even PTC individual lap bars are better in my opinion. I’d love this ride to get PTC trains, especially since they make more sense on a ride this historic.

I think Wildcat should get the RMC treatment or have it torn and renovated from Gravity Group, like the case at Toreenne du Zeus at Parc Asterix

Was Wildcat at Lake Compounce more painful and rougher with the old trains and old track?

Like wildcat at Hershey park now I think this should get RMCED and I haven’t rode it yet

would you rather ride wildcat at Hershey park or this wildcat

Real question is, after essentially wasting their money with a failed re-tracking, will park officials decide to drop more money to try and fix it again? Its a landmark roller coaster, so I doubt it would get RMC'd (and I can hear the purists groan already just thinking of the notion) but do you think they might lean towards re-profiling the whole layout this time around? (Not just re-tracking, like how the Timber Wolf lost its helix in favor of a wave turn)

I'm a bit late, but does Lake Compounce have any future plans on re-tracking this ride with a more reputable company?

In your list of rides and coasters at Lake Compounce, why is Wildcat not included?

They are closing the wildcat for the 2023 season for retracting and offer refurbishing

Do you remember another roller coaster that got retrack or some change that made the ride rougher?

What would you rate Wildcat? the old version? the 2017 version?

Do you like all rides and coasters at Lake Compounce, are none painful?

While I think Wildcat isn't even close to as rough as most say, it's a boring layout devoid of airtime. I'd give it a 4!out of 10, worth it to get the credit but no reason to ride multiple times. And I consider it a 1985 Dinn, not a 1927 Schmeck being that it was torn down to the ground and a clone was put in its place. Given that, the "don't RMC or Titian Track classics" rule does not apply to Wildcat as far as I'm concerned.

Also I just realized this: both wildcats are rough woodies that should get rmc’d