The Pinewood Derby

The big day finally arrived yesterday. The boy and the lass got their shot at glory. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out whose car is whose. I’m proud to say that all the painting, stickers and other decorations were accomplished by the kids. Only the smallest bit of help from us for minor things like cutting a sticker out of the sheet or something like that. Otherwise, the kids had full say.

The festivities started around 3:30 with the weigh-in and inspection of cars. That took about 45 minutes. Myself and several other parents had prepped the track and double checked that the finish line was in working order- there’s an electronic finish line that determined time and winner of each race.

Sometime around 6:00 we had our pack winner and a winner for pack-member siblings. Neither the boy nor the lass won. The boy didn’t even make the semi-finals. More on that later. Ironically, some friends of theirs whom I was fairly instrumental in helping build their cars did very well. One of them won the sibling race! The other made the finals and finished third overall.

I was the official race starter, and with some help from another Dad, announced each of the racer’s cars, then provided a countdown. All of the kids joined in with the countdown for each and every race, so it was great fun for everyone. We also had someone entering race results (1st, 2nd, 3rd- no times) in a computer program which also generated lane and heat-assignments. Lastly, a couple of other parents were the “runners”- setting the cars on the track for each start and then retrieving the cars after each race.

Despite the boy’s car not making the finals, I can say he had a fast car. He placed second in all three of his races and the scoring was such that this was not good enough to make the semi-final round. From my viewpoint, I was able to see the winning times. The fastest cars were able to finish in the 2.59 second range, with the bulk of the times in the low 2.6’s. (Yes, the finish line timer recorded time out to thousandth’s of a second. Don’t laugh- any one of a number of races were decided by less than 1/100th of a second. We even had a tie.)

Because of the way heat assignments were made, if the boy happened to race against 1 faster car in each of his three races, then he was denied making the semi-finals. In fact, each of the 3 cars that beat his made the semi’s. This was a flaw in the race format I felt, although with the winner-take-all nature of the Derby the flaw didn’t affect the ultimate race winner. It just affected the semi-finalists since a winner from a slower heat could make the semi’s.

The boy did not handle defeat well. Though in some ways he was better than he’s been in the past. I love the fact that he wants to win. Hopefully, he will learn to temper his desire appropriately. The lass, for her part, was all smiles and mainly thrilled that her car got a chance to run. She actually pulled out a win in one of her heats, and she was justifiably excited about that.

A few things I think I learned during my observations. First, weight mattered more than any other single factor. The car needs to be 5 oz. on the nose. Further, that weight really needs to be concentrated to the back and up high in the car. For cars weighted this way, it was possible to actually watch them pull away from other cars that weren’t weighted “properly.” After weighting, the tracking of the car was extremely important. The car needs to track straight as an arrow or it would rub against a center guide rail and lose speed. It was especially important at the beginning so that maximum speed could be attained for the flat portion of the track.

After these elements, I think everything else returned marginal gains at best. Stuff like polishing the nails and using the dry lubricant only provided marginal benefit. Breaking the car in with simulated races didn’t seem to matter a lot either. (I had used a Dremel to spin the wheels on each of the kids’ cars.) Aerodynamics didn’t matter worth a whit.

In all, an afternoon well spent. I’m pretty sure everyone was tired when it was all said and done. The boy recovered from “the agony of defeat” enough to go skating with his friends. The lass didn’t suffer from the same agony, and she had fun skating as well.