Ethan had his second pinewood derby today. He made his car look like Lightning McQueen from the Disney movie “Cars”. It turned out to be a really cool looking car, but it didn’t do very well in the races.
First of all we got to the church and he weighed in his car. It was really light, but he said he didn’t want to add any weights to it, so next we just waited for the races to start. Right before they started the races, someone made a comment about putting graphite on the wheels/axles, and Kyle decided to run over to the table and do that really fast before Ethan’s car was up. Ethan’s name came up, and he put his car on the track all excited to see it go, and then it didn’t even make it to the finish line. It rolled down the ramp and then stopped dead on the straight part of the track. Ethan sat there crushed, just staring at it as people told him to just push it through, so the timer for his car would stop counting. Kyle and another dad saw how upset he was and went to help him fix it up a bit to hopefully help the car make it to the end of the track next time. The second time his car was up, it again didn’t make it to the end of the track. Kyle asked the cubmaster if they could add some weight to the car hoping that that may make a difference, and they got permission to do so. And they continued to graphite the wheels after each race. I noticed that with each time his car went down the track the time was better and better, but the damage was done.
They way that the race works is, each boy’s car gets to race 6 times, twice down each of the three lanes. They take the slowest time, and throw that one out, then they add up all the rest of the times. Then they rank the cars based on that number. Well this year instead of just going through the whole pack and starting with boy number 20 and working their way up to the top three, they announced the places within the ranks. So they announced the order that the cars came in for the wolf den, then the bear den and finally the webelos. Ethan came in last of all the bears, and you could tell that he was really disappointed. Then they proceeded to announce the top three overall winners. After that was all done and we were having refreshments and the boys were sending their cars down the track just for fun, they had up on the screen the scores of all the boys in the pack. Ethan’s car was dead last, and Ethan saw it. He was in such a grouchy mood for the rest of the day. But Kyle told him that we would go to the scout shop and buy some more kits and practice making cars between now and the next derby so that hopefully, next year’s race will be better. 🙂