Pinewood Derby -- Highs and Lows

I feel bad for my son Nick, a Bear Scout in our Cub Scout pack. Really bad.

Yesterday was our pack's Pinewood Derby. We put the car together at the last minute. He sanded and painted the car body during the week, and we spent Saturday morning getting the axles and tires ready. Sadly, while trying to get the right front axle into the slot on the thin piece of his Indy-style race car wing, I chipped off a piece of wood. It didn't seem like a big deal, and I was able to get the axles into those annoying slots without much further trouble. I gave it a quick test and it seemed to be rolling okay. I put it on the pack's official scale, added weights to get it up to the maximum allowable weight of 5.0 ounces, and put it in the impound boxes with the other cars.

But that's not why I feel bad for Nick.

Race day came, and the morning was spent getting the facilities and the track set up. Nick was hoping his car would do well, but I told him that as long as we tried our best, then however the car does is just fine.

Nick's car was in the fourth and final group, so he had to wait for the other groups to run their first heat. His car was in the same group as last year's winner, so I was hoping that it would at least finish second so it would be included in the "second chance" group. The gate dropped... and while the previous champion's car wiggled down the track, Nick's car pulled away for a clear win, clearing the scoring device and crashing into the rubber pad held in place at the end of the track by the Webelos II Scouts. I could hear Nick shout out with excitement.

We ran through some cars in the open division (for non-Scouts or cars from previous years), through the first three groups again, and then back to Nick's group. The cars are placed into different lanes according to a carefully calculated algorithm so that it is as fair as possible. We have an 8-lane track (with 7 working scoring devices), so each car will run once from the left, once from the middle, and once from the right, so that any advantage one lane might have will get cancelled out. It didn't matter as Nick's car again came in first. Nick was going wild.

All Nick needed in the third heat was a second place finish or better to lock up a spot in the finals, and his car cruised to another victory. So, his car swept all three heats (as did the winners of the other three groups), and he advanced to the finals.

By now, Nick was ecstatic, running up to me every few minutes to ask if he was going to get a trophy. I told him we'd have to see, but he kept running back to me every few minutes to ask a similar question.

We took cars for a "second chance" race, ran three heats with those, and the top three advanced to the finals. This gave us a full field of seven cars for the finals.

The cars were placed at the gate for the first heat, the scoring computer was set, and the gate was lowered. It was a close race, but Nick's car clearly came in first. Nick ran up to me again and was excitedly hugging me. We had made the fastest car in the pack. Everything was going right.

Suddenly, everything went wrong. On the second heat, it seemed like the gate didn't drop cleanly. It looked like one car got a much better jump than the others, and it ended up winning the heat. Nick's car didn't even finish in the top three. I decided to let the run stand, not thinking it would be a big problem. Apparently, there was a problem. Something was wrong with Nick's car now. The gate dropped cleanly for the third heat, and Nick's car again did not finish in the top three.

Nick finished fourth overall, and although he still got a small trophy, he was clearly disappointed. He missed out on a larger trophy plus a much larger trophy that he would have been able to take home for a full year. When he won a trophy as a Tiger, he was so excited he even took it with him when he went out to dinner that night. (He also forgot it at the diner, and I had to go retrieve it that evening, but I digress.) But this was different. He was so disappointed, that he didn't even want this trophy.

When I finally got to look at his car when we got home, I noticed that a couple of weights that had been glued to the bottom of the car were coming loose. Also, the front axles were a bit out of alignment. I don't know if this happened after the first heat when the cars crashed into the padding or if these were things that happened from Nick mishandling the car after the race was over. (He actually stuck the car in his pocket at one point.) At any rate, I probably should have checked his car before the third heat, but I didn't suspect anything was wrong with it at the time. I thought the bad finish in the second heat was just because of the funky start that time. If I had checked the car after the second heat, I might have been able to fix a problem if there was one, and Nick might still have won, or at least finished well enough to get one of the bigger trophies.

I'm sorry Nick. At least we tried our best.