Unfairness at the Pinewood Derby

When I was in the third grade, I got to join the Cub Scouts. I had a lot of fun and got to take part in a lot of activities, but there is one thing that bothered me all three years I was in it. That is the Pinewood Derby.

Now, I'm not talking about how the scouts' fathers do all the work on the cars. I mean, my father did almost all the work on my cars because he didn't trust me with power tools at that age. No, my issue was the method used to determine the winner. I don't know how the rest of the country did it, but in my town, it was a Double Elimination tournament.

In this method, everyone is paired up with one other competitor in the first round. Those who win go to the second round. Those winners go to the third round and so on until you have one person who has won every round in the first half. Anybody who loses at any point during the first half has to wait until the second half to race again.

So, in the second half, everybody who lost is paired up again with one of the other losing competitors from the first round and the process starts all over again until a winner is declared for the second half, who then goes up against the winner of the first half.

My problem was that if you lose in the first round, you have to wait until the second half before you could race again. This could take more than an hour. If you lose in the first round of the second half, then you don't get to race again and you are forced to sit through the rest of the tournament to see who won.

This happened to me the first two years I participated. There were about 100 scouts taking part in the competition each year. This means that 25 scouts, a full fourth of the boys there, only got to race their cars twice. What fun was that?

Now, I don't know if the gameplay has changed since then, but it appears they could have come up with a better system of determining a winner by having everyone participate in an equal number of races before final rounds. I have noticed pictures of some tracks that can handle four cars at one time. I hope that contributes to scouts being able to race a few more times.

In the third grade, I designed the car myself. I drew the line on the block of wood and my father cut it out. He placed a ballast inside the body of the car and slapped it together with glue. When we went to the practice, my car exceeded the weight limit, so my father had to take some of the ballast out. When we took the car to be weighed at the event, the judge shook his head. My car was very much UNDER the limit and there was no way we could make any adjustment to it. I lost my two races.

In the fourth grade, I had seen a picture of a Pinewood Derby car shaped like a banana, with the stem pointing up. I wanted to make a car like that. At the last Derby, my dad had talked to other fathers and learned that we needed to make the car more aerodynamic. He went nuts trying to design the car to look like a banana and be aerodynamic. It did not have a stem. Well, it didn't work. I still lost my first two races.

In the fifth grade, I was in Webelos. This year, my dad took complete control of the car design and building. He was determined to have me win at least one race. It actually worked. I won enough times that I came in 9th place. It would have really stunk if I only got to be in two races again.

I don't think winning at all costs would have been that much of an issue if they had a method in place to allow the boys to be involved in more races. This might allow the scouts to be more involved. We could have fun and learn something without always having to win. That should always be the main consideration.