My son is a Tiger Scout this year, so we built our very first Pinewood Derby car and took it to the races today. It was a really fun, high energy event, which made it perfect for sketching.
There’s so many categories and races, but the BIG one is the main pinewood derby race, where you race your car down a high-tech ramp that measures your time to fractions of a second. Every kid wants to win the prize for the fastest car!
Besides the fastest car race, there’s one for different categories like “Go the distance” where you roll your car down a slight incline and then see how far it goes along a flat plain. Vehicle Escort Officials, Recording Officials and Security Personnel, all older scouts , help with measuring and recording distances.
“To The Line” measures how close you can roll your car to a target marked on the floor. And for when you’re hungry there’s tons of snacks. My kids had more then their fair share of cookies and brownies.
And this is Nishant, my proud Tiger Scout and his car “Death Stalker” ( don’t ask where the name came from!). I wasn’t the only one sketching. Kavya, my daughter sketched Nishant’s car.
Sketch Away: Travels with my sketchbook 
Things weren’t this advanced during my time in Scouts, but it sure appears that you have captured the scene as it now is. Great job!
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Suhita! Thanks for the memory and your lovely drawings. My boys, now 46 and 43, were avid Pinewood Racers. We noticed (and so have you, I imagine) that some other kids’ racers looked as if they had been built by professionals. Our guys had to do all of the work themselves.
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Memories; I was a cub scout and did a pinewood derby once. What a great tradition and what a great organization. Absolutely love the sketches. Do you color on-site or later on?
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Jason, on site. always. I carry around a little portable watercolor kit. If I work later, I tend to work less loosely and intuitively.
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Wait until your boy moves from Cub Scouts to Boy Scout (11 yr. and older) that is when my son’s troop drilled holes in their old PW cars and put small rocket explosives in. Put it on a starting gate and lite the fuse. Explosive fun. Wish I had been carrying sketching gear for that one. Nice capture.
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