Time for a Drink

After a morning filled with hockey, we had an afternoon filled with Pinewood Derby cars. I’m aware that it’s likely a bit tedious to keep hearing about this stuff, but the Pinewood Derby is the event for Cub Scouts. Every family turns out for it and how well it’s perceived to run is kind of a judgement on the competency of the leadership group. As I stated in my previous post, there’s a lot to account for and, correspondingly, a lot that can go wrong.

I’m happy to report that, even though it wasn’t completely smooth sailing, we passed with high marks today. We were ahead of schedule by 20 minutes after the first heat- we allotted 30 minutes for the heat and we were done with it after 15 minutes. The assigned inspection times actually worked out better than expected- all the cars for all of the heats were signed in with time to spare. My guess is the combination of knowing there was a time limit caused people to make sure they were prepared. Couple that with limiting the number of kids for each time slot and it just worked.

That’s not to say there weren’t a few surprises. The first one came during the first inspection. One of the kids had extended the wheel base of their car. The boy was a Tiger Scout, and I didn’t want his car not to run so I opted to allow it to run, but it would automatically be assigned a 3rd place finish- in short it was technically disqualified. I explained it to the Mom and she was OK with it. There really wasn’t an excuse for it as I had sent an extensive email explaining the rules for car design. I was very explicit about this in that email.

There was also the race where I accidentally impeded a car after starting the race. But I immediately declared a do-over, even before the cars finished, so it wasn’t a problem.

We even ended up having 4 qualifiers for our finals this year, instead of 3 like we typically have. Fortunately, I’d already thought of that possibility and we simply included the 4th car in the finals competition. Even though it was a first, it was a non-problem.

When it was all said and done, the boy made the semi-final round with his coffin car. I thought he overachieved, frankly. The lass tied for first in the sibling race with her parrot car. The boy showed signs of maturity, pouting for a bit because he didn’t make the finals, but getting over it pretty quickly and he didn’t snipe at his sister. A bonus was that everybody loved their cars, particularly the boy’s, which was quite unique.

There were some other cool cars as well, including a couple of Batmobiles, a Spiderman car, a Phineas and Pherb car, a salamander car complete with googly eyes, a hum-vee and Herby the Lovebug. For all the unique designs though, the top places were all basic variations on the wedge shape, which is a classic in winning Derby designs.

Our only issue during the race was stopping the cars. When we’d set things up, we used a carpet to with an incline to try and stop the cars. It worked well with our test cars, but not at all with the actual entries, which were much faster than the test cars. That’s something we’ll have to figure out for next year.

But first, I’m going to have a drink.