The big day finally arrived – the Pinewood Derby! Since its inception in the 1950’s, more than 100 million pinewood derby cars have been built by scouts… with a small percentage being built by their dads. =]
The variety of the cars is always quite amazing!
The Derby is the one meeting when the whole family shows up to the pack meeting… its a great event! The meeting part of the pack meeting goes first, then the race.
The highlight, obviously, is the race… there are 4 lanes on the track, and each car races 4 heats, one in each lane. Then, the top 16 are put into a championship heat, and the cars race 4 more times, once in each lane. The times are averaged, and the three fastest cars in each den are identified, as well as the three fastest cars overall.
Both of the boys’ cars made it into the finals round… pretty exciting!
The finals heats were pretty exciting… the cars were VERY fast. The two cars were less than .1 seconds apart from each other… winning times were often determined in the hundredths and thousandths of a second.
The scores were tallied and the winners were declared. They did great… 1st and 2nd in their dens, and the not so little guy got third over all. The fastest car was in the littlest guy’s den, built by a granddad who was a NASA engineer. Only a few hundredth’s of a second were between 1st and 3rd over all, and the little guy’s car was only 9/100 seconds slower than the winner, showing how close the races were!
Fun times!
Our Northwest Family 