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Comment by NoGravitas | Hacker News Reader

When I was in Cub Scouts (30 years ago), the rules for Pinewood Derby were (at least as I understood them), fairly strict. You had to use the stock wheels and axles, and carve the car out of the provided block of wood, but you could weight the car any way you liked, up to the specified weight limit.

Given these constraints, there was one optimal design that would always win: essentially, a skateboard about 1cm thick, weighted exactly up to the limit with cast lead, with the bottom of the skateboard waxed. Everyone knew that was the optimal design, but it looked boring, and its performance was completely predictable, so almost no one used it. But every year, there was one kid who (or whose father) cared more about winning than about having a cool PWD car...

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I beat you by a fair bit on seniority--going on 50 years. I was the kid whose dad figured out that looks were nothing and weight was all. Somebody who optimized for weight and aerodynamics might have beaten us, but that somebody didn't show up in our troop.

That's interesting, because my first year, I optimized for aerodynamics (and maximized the weight) but lost severely.

In later years, I realized that it had more to do with the wheel friction, and I made cars that were more interesting than perfect teardrop shapes and which also went much faster due to careful attention to wheel placement and lubrication.

I missed this... but yeah same thing here. We won every year lubricating the wheels and axles.

I just applied industrial strength lubricant to the wheels/axles and crushed everyone in my troop 3 years in a row or whatever it was. The final year we did it, I didn't even bother carving out or painting the car. I sent the lubricated brick down and it was unstoppable.

I was that kid. To this day I'm still resentful I didn't get to carve my own car with my new Swiss army knife. looking forward to being able to steal my own son's car one day to fulfill my pinewood derby ambitions...

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0398971/

I can't wait to watch this :)

Yes, this. I was in Cub Scouts about the same time (Hey there, old timer!) and can confirm. IIRC the winningest design around my stomping grounds were a pencil-thin body design instead of the flat one you talk about here. And weighed down as much as possible, of course. Absolutely I remember it being boring because of the complete lack of room for experimentation. I did it two years in a row, and being the only experimenter, ended up losing badly both times. Pinewood Derby specifically is the reason I hate sports or games with many artificial limitations that shoehorn every player into a very small number of strategies.

Oh wow, you just made me feel so much better about a decade of resentment. After placing dead last in my only two races, I knew there had to be a way to beat everyone...

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