Katy won second place in the Dream Catcher’s Service Unit Pinewood Derby!
We weren’t planning on entering. Katy’s troop was sponsoring it for the second year and the leader gave each girl a kit and said to build a car. So we did. Katy knew she wasn’t going to do much in the way of design so she went for speed rather than looks. She decided to carve the car into a wedge shape with lots of weight at the back.
Then I got to finish off some of the painting, take the car to the UPS store twice to be weighed (wanted to double-check our scales at home), filed down the axles with a electric drill. Whose project was this? After Katy cut off half the wood we had to add weights. Since Katy wasn’t concerned about looks, Heath screwed the weights onto the side of the car.
And it was off to the races!
Check-in for Daisies started at 12:45 and the Cadettes (Katy’s group) raced at 3:45 and there was lots of work in between.
Katy was in charge of greeting girls as they came in and passing out race flags. She got bored.
The girls also judged the cars for the design competition. They had trophies for most creative, Girl Scout theme and judge’s choice. There were some really neat cars.
This Frozen themed car was a Brownie entry and won Judge’s Choice. The Boy Scout leader helping to run the race said it ran surprisingly well. Katy had to tell me which princess was which.
This Junior car won most creative. The little girl’s mom said she (the little girl not the mom) is obsessed with dragons. The top is made from foam so it didn’t weigh much at all. However, if the timers hadn’t broken (more on that later) it wouldn’t have finished as it would have been too tall. However, the girl was more interested in the design aspect than the actual race, anyway.
There were only nine cars entered in the Cadette race and six of them were from Katy’s troop. One car couldn’t race because the girl recessed the wheel well and it wouldn’t fit onto the track. That happens.
This car won the Cadette Girl Scout theme award. Simple but gets the point across.
The way they do the races is they have three tracks. They race three cars in each track then go onto the next set of threes. Katy’s won every time it raced. However, there was a run-off for first and second place and the car it raced in the run-off was just simply faster. She was thrilled with second place.
Troop 140 members. A couple of the girls couldn’t make it.
The way do our race is each year the Cub Scouts have their races in the morning and then the Girl Scouts in the afternoon. Several of the Boy Scout leaders stay and run the equipment for us. They arrived at 6:45 and were there until 5 p.m. Long day!
The race is all computerized. There are flags at the end of the track and when the car goes under a timer that records the time, it goes to the computer and is shown on a screen so you can see how well your car did.
Then the computer tells which cars to race against which ones to eventually get to the winner. It works great when it works. Today it broke down during the Brownie races. So there wasn’t any choice but eyeball it. I left for a little while and missed all of this, I imagine they tried to fix it. They put a couple of pillows at the end of the track to stop the cars then had three people to watch and determine the finishing order. I don’t know how they decided which cars to run against which but the Boy Scout dads are great and know what they’re doing.
After all of the races were over with, a Brownie mom came up to our troop mom who was our organizer and said her daughter should have been in the run-off for third place for the Brownie race and was real upset that she wasn’t. It looked like there really was a mistake that had been made but human error is bound to happen. When the timers broke the only choice was to do it manually and do the best they could, calling it off wasn’t really an option. That mom said we should have had every car race against every car. There were 29 cars in the Brownie division alone, we’d be there until the middle of next week.
Other than that it went really well. We had about 80 cars entered. The Daisy race turned out to be very small as an entire troop, which was about half the 10 or so girls registered, didn’t show up for some reason. We never found out what happened there. There were 29 Brownies, about 30 Juniors and nine Cadettes.
One of the families in Katy’s troop has this go-cart they loaned us for decoration. Katy was apparently impressed.
