The first year my son competed, the first time the car raced (in a heat of 4 cars), his came in noticeably last (I didn’t know the benefits of graphite yet).

When the cars crossed the finish line, he turned around to me, and said in a loud voice, “Daaaaad! You made me lose!!!”

Why don’t we stop lying to ourselves and move the Pinewood Derby into the realm of father’s activities instead of scouting activities?

SilverRain,

The father’s can’t have their own activity until the whole priesthood reports 100% hometeaching. Piggy-backing the Pinewood derby is all we’ve got.

Q,

I know all about all those methods. They were all against the rules this year except the sanding part.

One that stuck with me was about seven years ago. A boy’s father was in Japan for work during the month leading up to the race. The boy’s car was a painted block that took first place. It put the contributions of fathers to these things in perspective.

We never had much success in pinewood derby with our oldest–the people in our ward who arranged the derby also had access to the track beforehand because a relative of theirs owned the track. Found out later that their secret was to run the car as many times as time would allow before the actual event. The more times the car runs, the faster it gets. So, my younger boys all won their derbys. I made sure their cars were done and then let them play with them as much as they wanted (by rolling them) before the actual day of the derby. The more those wheels and axles get broken in, the better the car runs. Just make sure they don’t play rough, so as not to break anything. Of course, the graphite, sanding wheels and axles, etc, has to be done, too, but after all that, running the stupid thing is what makes it faster.

MAC—Oh, that explains everything.

Our ward has a strict rule that the cars are built by the boys during the cub meetings in the month before the event – we have a couple of woodworkers in the ward who show up to help. Some years we also host a “non-cub” event after the boys are all through racing where anyone in the ward can bring a derby car and race it. That lets the girls and any older “kids” have fun as well.

That is a very, very good idea. That makes the kids much more of a participant in the process. I’ve often thought that the PW would be a lot better if the cars came pre-made and the only thing the kids got to do was paint them.

SUNNofaB.C.Rich,

I only got through half of comment #17 before my mind wandered but your comment made me go back and read it.

Kind of boils down to teaching kids that they don’t have to excel, there is always a way to get what you want on a technicality. For some unknown it beings images of Al Sharpton to my mind.

Mac, exactly.

23. “Your competitors must invite you to race them. What kind of skills do you think that takes?”

Having the slowest car isn’t really a skill, so that sounds like a popularity contest to me.

Sounds like a contest to develop budding Machavellians. Which is what we need to encourage more than axle polishing if we’re going to have cub scouts who will grow to be men who can wrap the world around their finger.

Machiavelli will not get far if you don’t let him. For example, we added a new feature at a YM & YW exhibition race this last Spring consisting of a computer scoreboard that kept track of standings in the whole race and updated them after each heat (Microsoft Excel was used). This was projected on a big screen at the head of the track. Before long those teenagers noticed that so and so was out ahead. A whispering campaign went around saying, “Don’t race so and so any more, he is too far ahead.” See? Yet it turns out that he was no Machiavelli. The competitors had done it to themselves. He happened to have the fastest car, and the others wasted their efforts trying to beat him even after I warned them before the race not to race a car faster than theirs. They didn’t listen to me, and when they realized it, they couldn’t catch up. This has happened more than once before.

Actually, the fastest car does win fairly often. In fact, winning cars are somewhat evenly divided among fast, medium speed, and slow cars. I kept race charts from the very beginning and have studied them trying to figure out what happened. I don’t know what I can tell you except that the reasons may be too numerous to mention. In many cases I am completely befuddled.

To MAC: This alternative competition empowers each Cub Scout to have a piece of the action. I have noticed that the kids are quite content after the race. They don’t feel like spectators having watched fate unfold. During the race they swarm around in groups yelling at the next competitor up to, “Race me. Race me. I am slow, You can beat me.” It sometimes borders on riot. Yet never have I had someone disturb the track or the cars even though they crowd it pretty close. Al Sharpton wouldn’t stand a chance in a group like that.

The problem with Pinewood Derby in its current form is that it takes most of the participation away from the kids. they generally have little or nothing to do with making the car fast or slow or even in how the car looks. It’s all done by the dads. This idea that Kruiser has at least has the benefit of creating a way for the kids to participate more and it takes some of the emphasis off just having a fast car and places it on strategy. Those are both very good things.

SUNNofaB.C.Rich @ 29,

I agree completely, but you forgot the added bonus of encouraging anti-social behavior …

During the race they swarm around in groups yelling at the next competitor up to, “Race me. Race me. I am slow, You can beat me.” It sometimes borders on riot.

If the problem is the dads, then address the problem. Don’t create some mamby-pamby alternative where kids are rewarded for being a failure.

Why don’t you hold two separate competitions, one for kids who build their cars with assistance and one for those who build it themselves.

MCQ, as I stated in a previous comment, I saw an eight-year-old boy, whose father was out of the country and had been for a month, bring a painted block of wood to his first pinewood derby, and he beat everyone. If you and Kruiser want to turn a race into a social contest that sends home sad, inept kids who couldn’t get anyone to race them, I wish you would stick to promoting boxing instead. (I’ve been reading Jack Dempsey biographies lately; I didn’t know before how difficult it could be for an fighter without an effective manager to find a fight.)

Kruiser,

I don’t think that you are going to get agreement on this one. Your last post makes the opposing point as well as it makes your own.

When you say things like “he fell behind because of his own hubris and/or animosity from others.” or “The latter is to be more desired because at least the participant had empowerment and could go home feeling he had some influence on the outcome.” along with earlier comments I assume that you see a kid developing alternative skills of cooperation/problem-solving etc. Another reader sees this as a detrimental feminization of a boyhood ritual and having the potential to punish effort while rewarding mediocrity. How one weights the possible outcomes is a personal judgement.

If dads are the problem, I think a good leader could easily rectify it by having the kids assemble their cars together at a pack meeting. This would give the leaders a chance to level the playing field WRT to technical know-how and allow the kids see the effort and care that each puts into making the best car possible. This would also provide the added benefit of having the track available to test and tweek their designs. In this scenario, effort and care will result in the best results, winner’s rewards are not diluted and losers can be assessed and coached by their leaders.

“I saw an eight-year-old boy, whose father was out of the country and had been for a month, bring a painted block of wood to his first pinewood derby, and he beat everyone.”

Sorry, but that is just ridiculous in the context of any normal pinewood derby. It’s impossible unless the kid is a genius, the other participants were retarded AND the rules of the competition were completely different from the norm. First of all, the weight of the block would be all wrong, secondly, there’s no way an 8 yr old could assemble the wheels and axels in any way that would match the friction free abilities of any reasonable participant that had help from an adult.

If that were possible to do, there would be nothing wrong with pinewood derby, we could just let the kids build and race their own cars. Unfortunately, most 8 yr olds can’t build a car that even complies with the rules and can roll down the track. As a former cubmaster and scoutmaster, I’ve seen this repeatedly. I’ve built several cars myself, as an adult and know the many difficulties and mistakes that can happen. If I can’t do it well as an adult without experience and a lot of research and outside information and advanced tools, no 8 yr old can do it successfully. Just getting the weight right so that the car is within the rules and yet heavy enough to have a chance of winning is a major issue and takes a lot of advanced work.

I think MAC and BCRich are right. Strategy should have no bearing in sports. First we need to outlaw Time-outs in Basketball and Football. Let the clock keep running when a RB goes out of bounds, or on an incomplete pass. And forget about running plays – no-huddle no audible. Just hike the ball and see what happens. And we’ll banish Baseball altogether. That way brute-force and athletic ability will be the only factors, like our current iteration of PWDerby. Our sports have become too feminized. Namby pamby athletes.

Grandpa was an important factor in all my pinewood derby cars, and many I have heard about, as well.

“B.Russ. The game exists already, it’s called Calvinball.”

Touche.

As for the rest of your point . . . well . . . good luck with that.

And that’s why we don’t put engineers in charge of anything.

#40 Youre right B.Russ, we should just substitute strategizing scenarios into sports that don’t rely as much on strategy as other sports. Maybe at the next winter Olypmics they can just have the bobsledding teams play Risk against each other. Brilliant.

John it doesn’t matter how you slice it or what clever ripostes you make; in order for your story to be true the kid had to have some help.

ARE THE FASTEST CARS DISCRIMINATED AGAINST? GIVE THEM A HEAD START!

Back to the subject. After our first year of this kind of racing, we found that it would be good to give the kids an idea of the relative speeds of their cars before they started racing. We had divided our racers into two divisions; a junior division, ages 6,7,and 8, and a senior division, ages 9, 10, and 11+. Each division runs 15 cars. We used that old Partial Perfect 15 car, 1 round, Chart set up for a 3 lane track. It is computer generated and makes sure that each car runs 3 times and each time against different opponents. The fastest car will always win its heats. If you give it 3 points for each win, it can earn a total of 9 points. The slowest car will always come in third. If you give it 1.5 points for each third place, it will earn a total of 4.5 points. So the gap between the fastest and the slowest car is 4.5 points.

We put these results on a scoreboard for all to see with all 15 cars ranked according to the points they earned during that round. We also gave them those points to the points that they would earn in the regular race. Therefore the fastest car would start out 4.5 points ahead of the slowest car. That is the concession that we made to speed. One can see that the slowest car is going to have to run in twice as many heats as the fastest car just to keep up plus 3 more heats to overcome the head start and 1 more heat to get the lead. MORE LATER

Maybe at the next winter Olypmics they can just have the bobsledding teams play Risk against each other.

If the rules were laid out beforehand, the bobsled teams agreed, the sport was enjoyed by those involved, and people wanted to watch – I’d be fine with it.

The arguement wasn’t about the importance of strategy, it was about the asenine idea that implementing rules that favored strategy and de-emphasized design somehow femenized the competition. It was the most absurd arguement I’d ever seen. It still is. And your humerous response missed the mark because it argued against a point that wasn’t made.

Quite frankly, I don’t care whether one goes with Kruiser’s rules or with traditional rules. As long as the rules are laid out beforehand, everyone understands them, and people enjoy it; it seems like it should be fine.

That is just an issue of supply and demand, all those politicians, “public servants” and lawyers have flooded that market because they don’t have anything else productive to do.

Well, you’re right about there being too many lawyers, not going to argue against that.

But re: engineers being in charge – They would probably be confused about the idea of a unit of measure having a non-predictable fluctuating value (like the dollar), try to assign a stationary value to it, and then wonder why exports stop and the country has gone bankrupt. (kidding of course)

But at least the trains would run on time.

#54 B.Russ if it was anything other than a block of wood with spaces cut out for axles that is meant to be fashioned into a small car whose purpose is to go down the track as fast as possible then the alternative method might make sense. Instead it sounds like a “nothing you can do will change the outcome of your life, anybody that gets ahead is just “lucky” so they need to be throttled back and those that fall behind are simply just “unlucky” and need to be boosted up a notch at the expense of the “lucky” all through arbitrary unnatural rules that strive to create an artificial equality utopian wonderland” type situation.

AN ACTUAL CASE

Trying to find an actual example, I went back to last Summer’s senior division race which serves quite well. The preliminary (speed) round produced 2 cars with 9 points, a boy and a girl (pole positions), and 2 cars with 8 points also a boy and a girl. I will henceforth describe the cars as, for example, “9 car boy”, etc. The 9 car girl does not like to compete, as I have observed over 6 years of watching her race (she started at age 6), so she only raced once in the main event when it was her turn to pick her opponents. She did however race the 8 point boy and lost to him. (The same kind of thing happens in real auto racing where a slower car sometimes is faster.) The 8 car boy was the one I mentioned in my first post as quizing the girl about winning by losing. Of course he could not adopt a winning by losing strategy because his car was too fast. The 8 point girl was a rookie whom I had met only a few days before the race. I don’t know if she had any advanced knowlege of how the race worked. I can’t remember if she was at any of my two instruction classes. As it turned out, the 8 point boy and 8 point girl batteled it out, each racing 4 heats and winning all 4 causing them to tie for 1st place with 20 points each. How did such fast cars get anybody to race them? Each had to find 3 people to invite them to race. Quite a chore wouldn’t you say? The 9 car boy, also a rookie, refused to race them but came in 4th in the race.

There turned out to be 3 of the 4.5 cars. One girl, also a rookie, picked up on the win by loosing strategy right away. She made it obvious by seeking out allies before the race. Even under the best of circumstances, alliances are hard to make. After all, there were 2 other cars just as slow as hers, and they might have had friends who wanted to race them. Also alliances tend to fall apart in part or in full during the race. She went for it and was able to race in 8 heats. She won one heat and came in second in two more, the rest being third place finishes. Her total of 19 points put her in 2nd place just 1 point behind the leaders. If she had been invited to race in just one more heat, she would have won the whole thing.

We determine the winner of a tie by whoever races in the most heats. Since, this time, the number of heats was equal, we flipped a coin. The girl won. There were 15 heats total in this round, so the 4.5 car girl had to race in more than half of them. Notice that the 8 car winners earned 40% of their points in the preliminary (speed) round whereas the 2nd place winner earned 23% of its points in that round.

To answer #55. Yes I came up with myself along with 6 years of trial and error. #57 Yes it is my first visit to this site although I have visited other sites and talked on other subjects.

I suppose the important thing is that your doing it for the kids, and that’s admirable.

It’s been controversial for a while. I know people who have refused to participate in it because of these issues.

It just ocurred to me that much ado in PWD is made of the balancing of the wheels. Placing them just so, one of them slightly off the track, etc. I remember a couple of months ago we did a PWD at work and I was researching it on the net and found that aparrently the whole placement of the wheels thing is a big factor and there are some pretty expensive tools out there to mount the wheels perfectly for you.
So, maybe we can level the playing field by making a rule. Build your car, but you can’t put the wheels on until you arrive for the derby? What do you think?

The only problem I see with that MCQ, is how do we ask a den leader to supervise 50 boys between the ages of 8 and 11? While using power tools? I see many opportunities for practical application of that first aid belt-loop.

…..
If we’re getting volunteers to help, maybe a rule that says you can’t help your own kid?

I am so glad my pinewood derby days are behind me. Good Luck :)

Ron (my name too)

Actually all PWD cars run on three wheels, no excepttions for cars that have no suspensions, it is a law of physics. The fourth wheel may be so close to the ground that it looks that way, or it may even roll on the ground, but it carries no weight. Look close and you will see. However, it is possible to get a car to run on two wheels by balancing it equally between front and back. We had one that way once purely by accident. It was a world beater. Nothing could touch it. It had such a poor paint job, we called it the “Mud Duck.” Nobody wanted to race the Mud Duck. Yet its speed was not because it ran on two wheels. Can you suggest a reason why? Also those alignment tools etc. do not do a very good job. They do not detect slightly crooked axles and wobbly wheels among other things. You would need something like a high tech electron microscope to do that. Then it is almost impossible to move the wheels and axles to the correct alignment point.

Anyhow I am having a great time with this subject. I am gratified that all of you have participated. I can see that improving the PWD is your main concern.

It may have been suggested that my method was not fun, too stifling and confining. The exact opposite is the case. The kids have a rip roaring good time. When I stop by the Club, some of them jump all over me and yell, “When are we going to race again?” I could tell you a thousand stories, almost all of them happy stories. The kids seem to be learning the old adage that it is not the destination that matters but the journey. The fun is in the race, not the victory. The interaction that they have with each other in the heat of competition will stand them in good stead for a lifetime. Over a few years of participation they grow remarkably. Contrast this to the way it is done now.

Where there is competition there will always be controversy. Church basketball has taught us all about that. To minimize hard feelings, I try to instruct the participants about the anatomy of the race. I first tell them that they can race anybody they want, their friends or whatever. Then I try to explain some of the math to them. When it comes a certain person’s turn, he might try to race 2 cars that is slower than his as displayed on the speed chart. That way he is most likely to get a win and get the most points. Most importantly, during the race, he should try to get invited to race as much as possible so as to build up points. He does not have to worry about winning any of these races. He just needs to race to get points as he can. Scads of kids jumping up and down yelling, “Race me, race me!” is a sight to behold.

Finally I instruct them not to get discouraged if they find themselves not doing well. “If you are well behind,” I tell them, “You can always help one of your friends win by racing that friend (and encouraging others to do so), and making it so he can get the most points when he races you. That way you can be part of a team that wins.” If he lets his friend get 3 points in a heat, and the friend wins the race by 2 points, he can then say that he made the victory possible. This kind of racing can be won by cooperation as well as competition.