The short of it is, no winners. The longer version is we had 3 very fast cars that didn’t track true enough to win.
The boy had the best showing, cruising into the semi-finals. He won all three of his preliminary races making him one of 4 cars that were undefeated going into the semi-final round. But his axles loosened up or something and his car got squirrelly in the semi-final round and that cost him against the other fast cars that ran true.
The lass probably had the fastest car of the 3 of us, but also the most squirrelly. Her car led at the bottom of the ram in all three of her races, but the bouncing back and forth allowed her to be overtaken in the final stretch each time.
As for mine, I got a lot of compliments on the looks, but it didn’t run as good as it looked. I don’t think I got the weighting quite right, in retrospect. Also, it definitely could’ve tracked better.
Once again, lessons learned. I wrote this last year after the race and this year did nothing to change my mind: weighting and tracking are the keys to victory to the point of swamping out all other factors.
Zooming out a bit, it was a good afternoon of racing. Long, but good. We had a bunch of tight races, including a race with a tie where the cars tied again in the runoff. We finally got a winner on the 3rd match between the two. One of the other Dad’s told me it was the best batch of racing he’d seen in 8 years of bringing his kids to Scouts.
Despite the successes, the kids were still disappointed and acted the part, but it was more obvious to me that a good deal of it was an act. Since I was busy running things and the Wife was busy figuring out awards for the cars and taking pictures, neither of us had time to humor their act. It worked out for the better- turns out not feeding the monster kept it at bay. They tried it a bit on the Wife while they waited in the car to leave, but she called their bluff by telling them “Well, we just won’t race next year.” Neither one liked that idea and that was the end of it.
So ended this year’s derby. Despite enjoying the afternoon, I’m glad I won’t have to worry about it for another year.