My son’s Cub Scout pack ran its Pinewood Derby in the school gym. Every scout starts from the same kit: a block of pine, four nails for axles, four plastic wheels, and a sheet of number stickers. The council rules cap the car at seven inches long, two and three-quarter inches wide, three inches tall, and five ounces, with a flat front and nothing but the wheels touching the track.
Ours was the socket car. The block came down to a thin plank with a blunt wedge at the front and a channel routed down its centre, and a chrome socket went on at the tail with the number 40 on its side. Nothing was painted. A socket is a compact lump of steel; it was most of the car’s weight, and it sat at the back. The kitchen scale behind the car in the photograph is how we crept up on five ounces without going over. The kit box is there too, and the drill.
Weigh-in was the Thursday before the race, at a table the pack set up during the school’s Imagination Fair. I wrote to ask how long the table would stay open, since five o’clock is a hard time for most parents to make. It ran until half past seven, and we made it. The pack kept every car after inspection until race day; no adjustments after that.
The track ran most of the length of the gym on a row of folding tables, dropping from a tall wooden start ramp at one end. Checkered bunting hung along the sides, the families sat in folding chairs, and a projector put the timer on the wall. The pack had a big group of kids that year and the afternoon was scheduled for two or three hours of heats.
The organizer’s follow-up on Monday thanked everyone for coming and offered to re-engrave any trophy plate with the wrong den on it. I wrote back to ask where we had placed overall. The answer came from the parent who had programmed the timing system: my son was one spot out of the trophies in his division. The pack does not send out the full rankings, so that the kids lower down do not get embarrassed about where they finished, and we got the top five. I told him it sounded like he did pretty well.