Pinewood Madness

Ah, the sweet smell of pine. Jett recently raced his first pinewood derby car on a crazy cool track. The dude with the track seriously had way too much time on his hands and must have been a geeky engineer/scientist type. The track had light sensors that measured the time in thousandths of a second. The sensors were hooked up to his laptop and scaled the time measurements to the speed of the car if it were the size of an actual car. I was proud of Jett because he consistently exceeded 200 mph, way faster than my car. Having said that, it is a pain in the butt to build a car that doesn't lose if you procrastinate until the night before.

Jett completely chose the car design. I got all excited about building a sweet car with fins and those knife things that come out of the wheels like on Spy Hunter, but Jett wanted a car that looked like a pinewood derby car. Like the picture on the box. He drew on the side of the car exactly where I was supposed to cut. And the design was a wedge. (See below). It reminds me of my first car. Almost exactly. Except I think mine was a nice lime green with yellow stripes.


Jett did well for his first derby and placed 16th out of 37. I was just glad he wasn't 37th out of 37. This was his moment of triumph.


Although I'm sure this is how he was picturing his moment of triumph.