Why pinewood derby cars run fast

There are lots of wild rumors about what makes fast (and slow) pinewood derby cars. We have this fancy electronic track which allows us to take cars, run them enough to determine what their typical time is, and then modify them and see what the modification does to the run time. So I feel qualified to add to these wild rumors.

Note that the track that our pack uses is one of constant slope. There were reasons for this, mostly due to lack of information. In any case, if you are running races on other track designs, then the following items may affect you to a different degree.

I do feel it would be interesting to actually do a controlled experiment a several sample cars to measure these things in detail. If you have a situation where you have repeatable electronic timing and the time and place to run such experiments, I would encourage you to do so and let me find out what you find. Run each configuration several times and average the results. Note that cars do change, especially if they get bumped together.

Our last race had cars which had typically run twelve races over the night. The cars turned in times of: So these races are won on very small margins. Paying attention to details will matter. Note that between 1st and 3rd place is 57 milliseconds. That is approximately 1/20 of a second. When you go to the movies they only put 24 pictures per second on the screen and you see it as continuous motion.

Not everybody agrees with my opinions. Some of this may be due to the nature of our track which is a constant slope track. Anyway, for other views, please see the pages on the WebRing as well as the comments below:



Last modified 27 May 2006
Questions or comments can be sent to Dave Regan.