How Busy Was Thorpe Park on Saturday, 1 August 2026?
Thorpe Park was quiet on Saturday, 1 August 2026. Across the day the average wait across all rides was 17 minutes, with the longest queue reaching 56 minutes for Storm Surge around 11:00. The full hour-by-hour breakdown for every ride is below.
Average wait in minutes per ride per hour (UK time), recorded on the day from the park's live wait-time system.
- Longest wait of the day: Storm Surge at 56 minutes (around 11:00).
- Average across all rides: 17 minutes.
- Quietest hour: 18:00 UK time.
| Ride | 10:00 | 11:00 | 12:00 | 13:00 | 14:00 | 15:00 | 16:00 | 17:00 | 18:00 | Avg |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Storm Surge | 23 | 56 | 56 | 56 | 52 | 55 | 53 | 46 | 28 | 47 |
| Hyperia | 51 | 44 | 32 | 32 | 32 | 35 | 30 | 23 | 19 | 33 |
| Ghost Train | – | – | – | 28 | 39 | 38 | 38 | 16 | 13 | 29 |
| Depth Charge | 12 | 15 | 36 | 31 | 31 | 38 | 35 | 28 | 16 | 27 |
| The Swarm | 32 | 30 | 27 | 26 | 25 | 28 | 28 | 19 | 8 | 25 |
| Nemesis Inferno | 10 | 32 | 33 | 29 | 22 | 34 | 21 | 16 | 9 | 23 |
| Stealth | 6 | 21 | 18 | 10 | 17 | – | 41 | 29 | 14 | 20 |
| SAW - The Ride | 7 | 32 | 28 | 24 | 21 | 23 | 19 | 8 | 5 | 19 |
| The Walking Dead©: The Ride | 5 | 10 | 27 | 12 | 23 | 25 | 20 | 16 | 10 | 16 |
| Samurai | 9 | 19 | 23 | 19 | 18 | 21 | 18 | 15 | 6 | 16 |
| Colossus | 6 | 24 | 25 | 29 | 15 | 16 | 12 | 5 | 5 | 15 |
| Tidal Wave | 6 | 14 | 15 | 12 | 24 | 29 | 13 | 8 | 10 | 15 |
| Flying Fish | 5 | 15 | 18 | 18 | 20 | 20 | 20 | 11 | 8 | 15 |
| Detonator | 5 | 11 | 15 | 15 | 14 | 18 | 12 | 10 | 5 | 12 |
| Rush | 7 | 15 | 18 | 11 | 18 | 14 | 10 | 11 | 8 | 12 |
| Big Easy Bumpers | 5 | 8 | 10 | 13 | 17 | 21 | 14 | 8 | 5 | 11 |
| Quantum | 5 | 5 | 10 | 13 | 12 | 16 | 16 | 8 | 7 | 10 |
| High Striker | 5 | 5 | 5 | 6 | 8 | 5 | 6 | 11 | 5 | 6 |
| Dobble Tea Party | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 |
| Mr Monkey's Banana Ride | 5 | 5 | 6 | 5 | 7 | 5 | 6 | 5 | 5 | 5 |
| Ready Player One 4D Experience | Age Rating 12A | – | – | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 |
Cells show the average standby wait during that hour. Blue = 20 min or under, orange = 21–60 min, navy = over 60 min.
What happened on Saturday, 1 August 2026
Saturday 1 August was a quiet day at Thorpe Park. Across every ride we recorded, the average standby wait came out at 17 minutes, roughly 15% below the 20-minute average across every day we have recorded.
That makes it a quieter-than-usual Saturday — other Saturdays in the archive average 19 minutes. Against August as a whole, which averages 21 minutes, it was one of the lighter days of the month. Weekends are consistently the busiest part of the week here, so this is the harder end of the spectrum to plan around.
Queues followed the usual pattern: they built through the morning, peaked across the middle of the day (averaging 20 minutes between 12:00 and 15:00), then eased off through the afternoon. The quietest hour across the park was 18:00. The single longest queue we recorded was Storm Surge at 56 minutes, around 11:00.
The rides holding the longest queues were Storm Surge, Hyperia and Ghost Train — Storm Surge averaged 47 minutes across the whole day and touched 56 at its worst. At the other end, five rides averaged 10 minutes or less — Quantum, High Striker, Dobble Tea Party and Mr Monkey's Banana Ride were close to walk-on for most of the day. The spread between the busiest and quietest ride was 42 minutes, which is wide enough that where you chose to walk mattered more than when you arrived.
On a day at this level, the standard tactics are enough on their own. Arriving at opening and working through the headline coasters first would have cleared the biggest queues before they built, and there would have been no case for paying to skip anything. You can compare this with other dates in the full archive, work out which days of the year behave like this using the queue calendar, and read the underlying tactics in our guide to beating the queues.
Based on readings taken every 2 minutes across 9 hours of operation, from 10:00 to 18:00, covering 21 rides. Figures are the wait times posted by the park, averaged per hour; a dash in the table means the ride reported no wait for that hour, usually because it was closed.