Pinewood Derby 2020

The boys had their first go at the Pinewood Derby with Cub Scouts a few weekends ago and it took quite a bit of time and effort to prep the cars for it.  Scott scoured the internet and I had a coworker lend us her "box of tools" they use for her son's derby car.  Scott had the unfortunate task of building not one, but two cars since boys are scouts.  After several weeks of working on them in the evening, spray painting them in the garage, and adding stickers the boys picked out at Ace Hardware, they were ready!

Evan's is the second one in with the skeletons and he called it "Bone Crusher".

Sean's is the second one in the middle row with that he called "The Bear".

We had to bring the cars in on Thursday evening to have them inspected and impounded until the race Saturday morning.  We were a little nervous with Sean's car because they stick a magnet to each wheel to make sure the axels used were the ones provided and the magnet only stuck to one out of the four.  They ended up approving it - thankfully!

Saturday morning, we headed over to the VFW for a 9am race time.  Evan's den did the flag ceremony and Evan was chosen to carry one of the flags!

The 5th graders, Senior Webelos, got to race first.  Each car races 6 times in each of 6 slots so that it has a turn in each of the slots.  The speeds are recorded and the overall fastest car progresses to the finals.  After the 5th graders, Evan's Tiger den got to go.  His car was consistently 4th place in each of the "heats".  Overall, he was 12th out of 17.  To say he was disappointed was an understatement, but the tears didn't start until after Sean's car went.

Sean's den was one of the last dens to go so it was quite a wait.  We were anticipating a similar result to Evan's since Scott built the cars almost the same.  We were shocked when Sean's car kept coming in 1st place!  In fact, he won for his den and got to go onto the finals!  They did a nice ceremony in the hallway where he got a trophy and a certificate and we had one more den to sit through before the finals started.  Most of the time waiting was spent consoling Evan who was not happy.

One boy from each den that took 1st place in their den got to compete in the finals.  There were five boys and each car got to race in all 6 of the slots.  Once again, we were shocked that Sean's car was either 1st or 2nd every single time!  He ended up winning 1st place overall and won by only a few milliseconds!  Unbelievable...

It was an exciting day for our family and we were completely blown away at winning the entire thing!  Scott has so many ideas for next year so we wrote them all down so that we don't forget them.