We have a District Champion.

[Eric]

We knew coming into this we would be running on a bunch of different tracks, but walking in and seeing this was a bit overwhelming.
It was a long nerve racking day filled with one violent wreck that our car got caught up in and one track that had a lane that did not like our car at all.
Scouts ran their cars three at a time non stop for one hour. Loser moved one track to the left, second place stayed on the same track and winners migrated one track to the right. The 42' best track ( far right side of pic) was only used for the finals. I can't remember what they call this method of racing, but it is non stop action!!!
A big shout out to DerbyDad4Hire you have some fantastic products and all who answered questions and gave advice along the way. We will be hanging around this site for at least the next four years. Lol

 

[CivilWarTalk]

Wow, that is the most amazing circus I've seen yet in Pinewood Derby! Look at all those clunker tracks! Good grief!

Way to go, that boy earned some awesome hardware for all his hard work in that derby!

 

[Eric]

Wow, that is the most amazing circus I've seen yet in Pinewood Derby! Look at all those clunker tracks! Good grief!

Way to go, that boy earned some awesome hardware for all his hard work in that derby!

It was definitely survival of the fittest at times. When I got the video of our car doing this on Lane 3 of the "fast track" I thought our day was done. My boy must have had 20 plus runs on this track and it seemed like every time he drew Lane 3 and it did this every time in the exact same spot and only on this Lane. It always managed to correct is self instantly. He only lost one race because of this and on that race he still finished second so it did not affect his track position.

 

[zigzag]

Wow - what a set up - looks like a bunch of different types of tracks. Must be a good darn car to survive all of that.... congrats.

 

[Eric]

Wow - what a set up - looks like a bunch of different types of tracks. Must be a good darn car to survive all of that.... congrats.

It was very interesting to say the least. My son was fortunate to draw # 3 so he started racing on the third track from the right. He won his first heat race so he moved up to the second track from the right ( this is our Pack track so we knew his car would run well on it ). He won his race on this track so he moved to the right one track again, this was the fast track. As long as you are winning or placing second on this track you stay put. They continue to run heat after heat for an hour. After the hour is up they announce qualifying is begining then start taking the winners from the fast track and moving them over to the finals track until they reach 12 finalist. Some Scouts drew track #7 at the start so they had to win and work their way to the right across all the tracks. My Son was the first to qualify as a finalist, so technically his car had 12 less heat races on it then the last Scout to qualify.
I'm not sure if other districts run this format or not? It seemed to run pretty smooth, naturally slow cars migrated to the left and fast cars migrated to the right. The Scouts never put down their cars, they where on a track and racing about every three minutes. When it was their turn to race all three scouts drew a ball out of a bucket for lane choice, they also had a colored ball that gave you a bye on that race.

 

[DerbyDad4Hire]

I actually LOVE this idea. More fun than just run down for times.

 

[Eric]

I actually LOVE this idea. More fun than just run down for times.

If I had to guess, our car had 40+ runs on it. With 50 Tigers racing it was 7 kids per track at the start so it was non stop action. In fact It was happening so fast I never got to watch other members of our Den race unless they were running against my son. We where not allowed to touch the car thru his age group finals. Once he made it to the overall finals they let us re graphite. We struggled with the decision on if we wanted to add graphite or not for the final four runs. Everybody else did so we did to. He ran his best time on the 42' best track, the car turned a 3.0180. I was happy with that time considering we actually detuned his car on purpose four hours before his race.

 

[Eric]

Found it, here is the name and info on this racing format.

15th Burlington

http://www.stanpope.net/bubblesort.htm

 

[GravityX]

Looks like organized chaos is about to ensue! I can see how one could be overwhelmed at the site of all those tracks.

Congrats on the all the hardware won!

 

[HurriCrane Racing]

Wow! A couple of those tracks don't even have stop sections. Just a foam bumper to crash into.
Congratulations!

 

[Mojo Racing]

Wow! A couple of those tracks don't even have stop sections. Just a foam bumper to crash into.
Congratulations!

one of the boys that I helped raced on one of those last night... chaos ensued... The track was a channel, not a center-rail track... the fastest car definitely did not win..

 

[Eric]

By far the worst wreck that my sons car was involved in happened on the 42' best track they used for the finals. I'm not familiar with the track so not sure if this is normal or not. The stop section did not fasten to the main track, it was just pushed up against it. Every time the cars would hit the stop section it would move away from the main track creating a gap. The wreck our car was involved in looked like the stop section actually shifted sideways a bit causing all the cars to clip the guide rail on the stop section (at full speed) with the DFW sending them flying. Once again I thought for sure we were done, but his car did not skip a beat after that. Next year we wanted to go thinner on the body but after the race we talked about it and I don't think a thinner car would have survived the day. We checked the car on the tuning board when we got home and was surprised to see it had the same amount of steering over four feet. I thought for sure something would have moved.
This style of racing definitely has some excitement attached to it since there are so many unknown factors attached to so many different tracks.

On another bright note, my boy was overjoyed again when he came home from school today and I showed him the local newspaper with his picture in it.

Eric

 

[Thinkin'Bout Racin]

By far the worst wreck that my sons car was involved in happened on the 42' best track they used for the finals. I'm not familiar with the track so not sure if this is normal or not. The stop section did not fasten to the main track, it was just pushed up against it. Every time the cars would hit the stop section it would move away from the main track creating a gap. The wreck our car was involved in looked like the stop section actually shifted sideways a bit causing all the cars to clip the guide rail on the stop section (at full speed) with the DFW sending them flying. Once again I thought for sure we were done, but his car did not skip a beat after that. Next year we wanted to go thinner on the body but after the race we talked about it and I don't think a thinner car would have survived the day. We checked the car on the tuning board when we got home and was surprised to see it had the same amount of steering over four feet. I thought for sure something would have moved.
This style of racing definitely has some excitement attached to it since there are so many unknown factors attached to so many different tracks.

On another bright note, my boy was overjoyed again when he came home from school today and I showed him the local newspaper with his picture in it.

Eric

Thanks for the pictures and the description of how everything went. Congrats to your boy and you on your success! I am new at this, but I think the Best Track stop section is supposed to be clipped to the main track just like all of the other sections??? We had almost the same thing happen last year at the stop section, but one of the Cub Scouts had bumped the end of the track. On that heat several cars went flying. Ours hit the floor and had a very noticeable dent right next to one of the rear wheels, but seemed to continue to run fine the rest of the day.

 

[Crash Enburn]

one of the boys that I helped raced on one of those last night... chaos ensued... The track was a channel, not a center-rail track... the fastest car definitely did not win..

Man. Would really suck to be on or left of that track. Your car that would crush all comers on the other tracks would get stuck there.

 

[DJofSYN]

Wow. As much as I want to say that's awesome it must've been hell setting up all those tracks. Am sure there wasn't much attention to setting them up properly. Survival of the fittest was good name for the race lol. Congrats on tbe win.

 

[Eric]

Wow. As much as I want to say that's awesome it must've been hell setting up all those tracks. Am sure there wasn't much attention to setting them up properly. Survival of the fittest was good name for the race lol. Congrats on tbe win.

Everybody was there Friday night to setup, they gave us three hours to get it done. We spent an hour setting our pack track up. Once set up we go over every joint on every lane with a straight edge adding shims if needed. I then spent almost an hour cleaning it with pledge.

Eric

 

[DJofSYN]

View attachment 192
Everybody was there Friday night to setup, they gave us three hours to get it done. We spent an hour setting our pack track up. Once set up we go over every joint on every lane with a straight edge adding shims if needed. I then spent almost an hour cleaning it with pledge.

Eric

That's good to hear. At our last pack race our car flew off the end 3 times. This was after one of the joints was corrected because it kept jumping lanes. I'm surprised our car made it out alive. Luckily I glued the axles. 3 cars had tires come off and we had to wait an hour while they fixed it. This year I'm volunteering for setup.

 

[GravityX]

Talk about a crash-box stop section. Ouch!