Scouts build and race pinewood derby cars to earn merit badges. But adults are obsessed enough with the competition to have their own leagues.
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.
As he learned in 2018, even a slight tweak can turn what would otherwise be a sweet victory into an agonizing defeat. When he raced his way back to Man of the Mountain that year, Inman was confident he’d win. But he’d blown his chances by shaving too much plastic from his wheels, making them just a hair too light. “I immediately went out and got a high-end scale that measures one one-thousandths of a gram,” he says. “Yeah, it gets that anal at times.
He’s just as careful with his wheels. A friend in Virginia who competes in a different league custom-cuts each set of four. Inman’s touch is a quadruple layer of Icon car wax anywhere the disk touches the track or the axle. Each coat dries for up to eight hours in a small oven—the kind nail salons use to cure polish. Afterward he weighs the wheels to ensure he won’t be disqualified again.
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