Derby Talk

Great pics! Gotta love the wedges!!!! Good luck on the 2-21-04 race. The Native American arrow is a neat design. Keep us posted on how it did.

Great theme cars!

You need to share more info to this site... anyone coaching their kids to that much success is doing something right.

Hope your son enjoy's the race tomorrow. Good Luck

The pics were great. Let us know the results of the race.

anyone coaching their kids to that much success is doing something right.

Whereas it may look impressive, I feel we got pretty lucky.
As I mentioned in another post, my father-in-law is a "Rocket Scientist" at NASA. He coached 2 sons through cub-scout PWD's, and gave us some tips our first year (2000). We build and race in 2 events every year (Cub Scouts, and Y-Guides), so we get twice the opportunities to win. At the Tiger/Wolf level, (6-7 years old) we did okay, but as my son got older the competition soon passed us by. So I started looking for tips on the internet, and wound up here. Notice not all trophies are for fastest car.
Will definitely post results of todays race soon (Sunday?)

Seems like the thing you are doing the most correctly is consistently spending your time where it counts.

It happened again. My oldest son (Adam) was very keen on winning, and spent a lot of time on his arrow car. My youngest son (Logan) at times seemed like he didn't care, and barely put in an effort. Logan came in 1st place out of 15 cars, and Adam came in 4th out of 5. Adam got 2nd place in the Best of Show category (that was questionable IMHO, but I won't complain).
I made a tactical error in the car design (Adam's only fault was listening to Dad's advice).
We used the Tungsten weights, and got the Cg very far back near the rear wheels. Due to the arrowhead design (which looked cool), the front wheels were kind of far back, making for a shorter wheelbase.
It weighed right at 5 oz, and rolled very straight.
However this track was in bad shape. It was around 60 feet long (8, 8 foot sections bolted together - starting gate 6 feet hight, ET's around 8 secs).
They used play-doh to fill the cracks where the sections fit together, yet cars still jumped the track often. It had 4 lanes, the cars raced in each lane once, and summed the ETs.
I suspect the arrow car would have been very fast on a 32 foot smooth BSA track, but the bumps and length of this track, I think favored the more stable, longer wheelbase, Cg near the center models.
Lesson learned for next year.

Well, I'm sure everyone had a great time. I always look at it as winning when you learn something new that can be used for the next race!

I added some pictures of the boys and the races to the page, instead of just cars, and trophies.
Logan (2nd from right) was really happy to win, despite how he looks in this photo with the trophy (I took several photos, and picked the best one - believe it or not).




Here is a great photo-finish picture of one of Adam's races (one he lost unfortunately - but I got the 1st and 2nd place cars in the picture).