EASY Pinewood Derby Car WINS using Science!!!

This is a Pinewood Derby car.

It comes in a kit, then you build it and put it together,

and then it uses gravity to go down a track.

So over 100 million of these cars have been built and raised by kids over the past 60 years.

Which means over 100 million dads have spent a lot of time at the workbench,

and then subsequently pretended their kid helped in some meaningful way.

But don't feel bad for the boys, because someday they'll grow up to be dads,

and then they'll get a chance to work on a car of their very own.

Now this is a much faster Pinewood Derby car.

But wait, this was my entry.

I was disqualified because apparently using jet propulsion goes against the spirit of the competition.

Let's roll!

This is a much faster legal car.

But what is it about this one that makes it so much faster than this one?

I mean really, is it the wheels? Is it the weight placement? Is it the axles?

And of the design features that influence speed, which one of those is the most important?

For example, do aerodynamics really play a role?

So today, we're going to use cold hard science to figure out how you can maximize your chance of taking home the trophy

with the least amount of effort.

There are a lot of opinions on how you build a fast car, and spoiler alert,

some of the most popular ones are completely false.

And at the end of the video, to prove science is in fact true,

I'll show you a car I built in 45 minutes based on what I learned,

and then show you how it did in competition.

So let's start with the fundamentals.

The Pinewood Derby is all about conservation of energy.

The amount of energy you start the race with is the same amount of energy you end the race with.

It's just a different kind.

So each of these blocks represents a unit of energy.

So at the beginning of the race, it's all potential energy, which is the energy associated with height.

So when you start, the higher your center of mass is on the track, the more of it you have.

And then at the end of the race, in a perfect world, all that potential energy has been converted to kinetic energy, block for block.

And kinetic energy is the energy of speed.

So you were really high on the track, and as you came down, all that height was converted into speed.

And you notice I said in a perfect world, because in reality, we lose some of that kinetic energy to friction.

It's dissipated through heat.

But you will notice that these two piles of friction and kinetic energy still add up to the original potential energy we started with.

Energy is conserved.

So if you can reduce friction, that means you're going to have more kinetic energy.

And that is the key.

This pile is the key to winning the race, because it has the speed term in there.

And whoever has the higher pile of blocks here, wins the race every time.

So for the rest of this video, we're going to discuss what truly matters in maximizing your kinetic energy, or your speed, or this pile.

How do you make this pile as big as possible with the least amount of effort?

Okay, so before we go any further, I want to introduce you to someone I met while doing the research for building the perfect pilot W car.

My name is Scott Acton, and I'm a physicist for Ball Aerospace.

About 10 years ago, my son and I kicked my wife's car out of the garage, and we converted it into the Pinewood Derby Research Facility.

For almost a year, we conducted experiments and used the laws of physics to determine exactly what it takes to make a winning Pinewood Derby race car.