My Son Wins the Pinewood!!!!!!!

Well, I'm proud to say that my son won his Pack's Pinewood Derby today! Fastest overall in his den and fastest overall in the Pack! Our Pack used a new track, timer, and software connected to my laptop to capture the times. It was a very nice setup and made the heats run very quickly and eliminated any tense moments around who won/lost a heat.

Ok, do you want to know why I think he won? It?s all about the physics of how an object accelerates through a fluid (air). On earth, an object travels at 32 feet/second² when dropped. Drop a golf ball on your foot. It hurts a little, but no big deal. Now drop the same ball from 30 feet in the air. When it hits your foot, its going to hurt more (um, don?t try this at home) because it built up additional speed. The build up of speed is known as potential energy. If you consider the shape of a typical Pinewood track, you?ll see that the sloped section is shorter than the flat section. What this means is that you need the weight of the car as far back on the car as possible without causing wheelies so that the car builds as much potential energy as possible. Both visual observations and the times support the discussion above in that cars like my son's pulled away only during the last 1/3 of the flat section.

As for design, we shaved off about 2/3 of the original car block into a simple wedge shape. Not too interesting, but since this year was my son's last, we were going for one thing: SPEED! Then we put two ounces of weight under the rear axle and almost another two ounces over the top. Yep, the rear was a ball of lead and tape but it just didn?t matter. At a record time of 2.5757 seconds, looks just don?t matter when the race is being decided by hundreths of a second!