09-03-2025
Disney Is Going Offroad, Breaks Ground on New 'Cars' Race Track
Disney is putting in the work to make their new Pixar's Cars-themed land as true to the form as possible by building an offroad dirt track for its vehicle rides to utilize once the park opens.
The new section of the park was first revealed in Disney's D23 summit last summer, where they also announced a live-action Monster Jam movie starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson.
During "The Future of World Building at Disney" talk during SXSW in Austin, Texas, Disney revealed its new track and ride plans for the newest section of Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom, where the Cars' Radiator Springs inhabitants leave their town behind to race through the desert.
The park will pull from offroad desert rally to bring park guests an immersive racing experience. Before Disney's imagineers began work on the track, the team traveled to Sedona, Arizona, to test-drive offroad vehicles, including the Polaris RZR, over rocky terrain to get the most honest feeling to mirror in the park's ride.
From there, the team enlisted the help of a motocross track building company to shrink the desert experience into a reasonable footprint.
The project now moves into developing customized vehicles that will take park guests through the new course. Disney Imagineer Michael Hundgen explained that these future cars are using data points gathered by customized production vehicles to see how they'll react to the track and how to make it the most genuine experience.
"We're using a customized production vehicle," Hundgen said. "It has sensors all over it, and we're taking it for test drives on our dirt track to gather data on how the vehicle responds to different terrain. This is where we turn that feeling we want into real-world engineering."
The vehicles will then go through a Disneyification process to bring them to life and help guests, young and old, have an emotional response to the existing and new characters of the Cars universe.
"Our primary goal is creating an emotional experience for our guests," Hundgen explained. "For this Cars attraction, we need to invent a new type of ride vehicle. No one builds these in a factory because it has to do so much more than just carrying you from one place to another. We have to create a car that conveys a feeling when you ride in it."
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