for months. It was the first Saturday of December 2018—tournament day—and he thought the cars he’d built could outperform anyone’s. They were compact. Sleek. Speedy. He watched anxiously as his pinewood derby racers took their spots at the top of a long, sloping aluminum track. When each heat began, they whizzed down the gleaming course. In the other lanes, the competition hopelessly gave chase.
Anyone who was a Boy Scout probably knows what a derby car is. Most likely your parents helped you fashion blocks of pine or balsa into a light, four-wheeled racer, usually about the width and length of an iPhone. You made them to win merit badges. For many, the experience is merely a cherished childhood memory.
Clean-shaven and with closely cropped hair, Inman is nothing if not deliberate—a holdover from his 28 years in the navy. A stack of more than a dozen yellow legal pads, filled with handwritten performance notes on 50 cars, sits on one shelf. He even insulated the garage door to keep the cold winter air from chilling him during the hours he spends tucked into the workbench.
By 2016, he was burned out on the amateur scene, and another dad urged him to try going pro. An online search led him to theInman’s hot pink star car Humble Pie is shown above, at center, surrounded by other models he crafted in his workshop.The move came naturally. He already knew from the lessons he taught in his workshop that maximizing potential energy and minimizing friction were the keys to victory.
To pick an oil to use on his axles, Inman purchased a bunch from multiple online derby shops, set up his own league-regulation aluminum track, and created an elaborate two-car test. For his control, he applied Krytox lubricating oil, a standard in many Scout competitions, to the axles. He then ran each vehicle down the track 18 times. The first six runs settled the fluid and stabilized the racers’ speed; the next 12 runs determined the Krytox’s effectiveness.
Matches themselves are fairly straightforward. There are now 10 different championship-series classes, each with its own construction guidelines. Four categories, for instance, have strict rules about how much wheels must weigh; another one limits vehicle length to 4 inches. People can send in as many cars and enter as many classes as they like. Some guys attempt just a handful of classes. Others, like Inman, try all 10. And it is, for the most part, guys.
I love it