Next Level Racing said:
Evolution and Spacewalker claim they came up with it and taught derbydad.
I have heard that one several times now too!
Lots of people have come up with great ideas for pinewood derby. You guys have it very lucky. I have raced since 2007 and a few people have freely given me help with no strings attached. JAC, Cam Car and ALine Performance. They did not tell me everything they knew but they were the first ones to help me. Information was very hard to come by and all you would ever get was bits and pieces. There have been two MAJOR discoveries in pinewood derby since I have been racing that have changed the course of league racing and made everyone competitive.
1st- The Block. Jewkes put out the tool that made building a fast car about as simple as it could be. Before the Block everyone was trying to bend their rear axles and it was a literal nightmare. The best racer at the time was Leo 234 Racing. He seemed to have mastered the rear canting first and he was using oil. The Block encountered MASSIVE resistance when it was introduced simply because it was me and the Jewkes marketing it. The Derby Worx clan pulled out all stops to bury us and failed miserably. Once I had the Block I shot to the top of the list. The thing is that the Block was not exclusive to me. A lot of racers got one or made their own version. I was successful because I built a shop from an empty warehouse and set up track and wore out a path alongside it testing and learning a lot of the things that the more experienced racers already knew but would never share. The Block gave every racer at least a .03 gain in speed which is unheard of.
2nd- THE Oil Process. Some people were using oil with success but until I made the switch the only racer that had surpassed me using oil was Carolina Gravity. Leo 234, Wheeler, and the rest of the original oil gang retired off as I was coming on but at the time they would not have been able to beat my graphite cars. Carolina Gravity pushed me into the oil research mode and we had what amounted to our own "arms race". I started working with it in the winter of 2009. I say I because I was alone when I started forming what is common today. Did I invent every step? NO! I listened and read what others said worked for other aspects of the polishing process. I used my common sense and put it all together. The trick is I spent more time than I could count testing and buying product after product to try. Breakthrough #1 came before the 2009 Lima Land Open. I found the Dupont multiuse spray. I was told 2 years before by railhugger that he used the Dupont silicone in some fashion to make his oil cars run fast but I never tried to figure it out. I learned if I sprayed the axles and the wheelbores and then added oil I picked up .01 over my graphite cars. THat was huge at the time. The trick was it had to be fresh and at best you got 50 runs before it died. I took 3 cars to Lima and ran in 6 classes with the 3 cars and took home 3 firsts and a 2nd and a 3rd I believe. (Something like that) In the classes the cars were supposed to be in it wasn't even close. My big axle cars almost beat the best needle cars. After Lima I went back to work testing. My brother came into the shop and started helping right before the Lima trip. THe next discovery was LEGEND. This is where the explosion came in and was the single most important discovery for oil. I am not sure of this but I think Carolina Gravity had this part figured out but did not have the spray for the axle. If we had been working together we would have had the answer a lot quicker. When I added the 2nd polish to the equation and quit spraying the wheel bore and just sprayed the axles the time drop was unbelievable. I remember when I found it was right before the King of the Hill race in 2009. InSuspense was at the shop when I first ran the car down the track and we both nearly fell over when the time popped up. We had to run it many times before we believed it. The foundation was then set. Me, my brother and InSuspense took to massive testing of all the sprays and polishes we could find to get the very best. The funny thing is that no combination was ever faster than the original Legend/Dupont combo that I did initially until my brother brought in a can of Jigaloo that his wife told him we needed to try. The Jig turned into the shop secret. It was about .005 faster than the blue can but it was devastating to the wheels if misapplied. It also lasted A LONG TIME! I used this to sweep the King of the Hill and we flat out dominated the racing for the next several months to the point of people literally whining and complaining of quitting. This is when I put on the oil workshop and what created the monster we have today. Racers like Evo and Spacewalker were not even near A class racers when it came to big axle cars. Spacewalker was a product of my shop when I was in NC. They both sat through the workshops just like the majority of the big name racers today that everyone holds in high regard. There have been several more like Murph that learned and then turned it against me touting the Derby Worx line. I should have thought of that before I showed ANYONE what I was doing. Hindsight is 20/20. During the workshops the one thing I did not teach people was Jigaloo and as a matter of fact I told people it was bad. In fact it WAS BAD if you did not use it right and I knew that you always keep one ace in the hole. I also knew I would be expected to replace all the wheels people ruined trying to use it if I recommended it. Unfortunately my brother had not learned that lesson yet and did not realize the few little snakes that are out there that quickly buddy up just to get info then leave you high and dry. SOme people were even mad at me like Spacewalker because I did not tell them EVERYTHING. LOL, I helped everyone get .03 faster and they were mad because I didn't get them the last.005. For those of you that did get mad at that you can [edited for content]. The shop secret got let out and now you have all the "experts." It is my understanding that even my secret to the oil mixture was given out to Spacewalker too. The credit for that secret goes to Donelson Gravity who helped me figure that mixture out. In 5 years from now when there is an entire new crop of racers you will be able to catch guys like Evo sitting in a group telling them about how hard he worked to bring all the pinewood derby tricks to them and Murph will be giving them the scientific theory about how he confangled the molecular hoobagoobas and brought the world the secrets to oil.
I have learned being in the pinewood derby business that you can't trust a secret with anyone and that no product is safe from being duplicated. Everyone takes credit and that is just how it is. There will NEVER be another breakthrough that will match the Block or the Oil Proces
s when it comes to speed gains. Sorry to say it but we are almost to the ceiling. The funny things is, if I had never showed a soul what I did with the oil there would not be a Spacewalker, Evolution, Murph... the list would go on. The funnier thing is that if the Jewkes had not of given us the Block then there would be no DerbyDad4Hire and the pinewood derby world would still be wasting their money on Derby Worx garbage. Cold hard truths. You racers need to understand exactly how lucky you are to be coming in now.
These are the facts as best as I can remember them now...
