A word about Double Elimination and the Pinewood Derby

I current serve as Cub Master in one of the local cub scout packs.  Unfortunately our numbers are really small so we combine with another unit.  We then decided to join in with a different unit to hold a Pinewood derby.  For all the effort, issues and mistakes the boy really enjoyed the event.

However, it was not easy and there could have been a lot more problems.  For one we ended up with a moving target when it came to the number of participating Cub Scouts.  And have you ever tried to run double elimination on an odd number of participants with multiple lanes?






I learned after this that unless the number of people involved is fairly large doing round robin style is the best.  In round robin you have each person compete against all the other players.  Easy to figure out the heats when only doing two lanes but, a little harder for 3 and 4 lanes.

There is a great site that has both 3 and 4 lane heat sheets for various numbers of racers.
Round Robin Heat Sheets Pinewood Derby

Now the reason I ran into so much trouble with double elimination is that you have to separate the winners from the losers.  How do you do that with 3 cars per heat?  You always have an odd man out.  Do you keep only the best and keep dumping the others down in the losers bracket?
Normally those in the losers bracket keep going till they lose their second race, then you have new people entering as they lose out in the semi-finals etc.  Sadly in all this you have the issues of a bad lane, etc that can taint the competition at least from the parents perspective.

So I created a funky system loosely based on the methods used in the FIFA World Cup.
You have several heats that switch the winners and losers so you've mixed it up for the second run.  Gets kind of hard when you have odd numbers of racers or heats.  Then I had a raw score taken for the two races.  The lowest scores were given the lowest rank and that determined who headed to the semi-finals and who went on to compete for the Golden Wrench (slowest car).

Now I also decided to do the round robinish stuff in the final and golden wrench last heats.  In part due to the fact I planned things out for 15 racers.  The version for 16 racers using 4 lanes works much better after you have the rankings.  See the diagrams below.

Now if you can understand the diagrams a bit you will see quickly why round robin is best.
Everyone would get to rotate lanes and competes against all the other racers.  There is no possible issue with saying well I never went up against so and so and therefore, I may be better.
So for the future I'm sticking with the round robin like I did for the Rain Gutter Regatta.  Far superior method of running races.  If you'd like a copy of the excel spread sheets with the race information just leave a comment and I be happy to get you a copy.

I'm including a link to great movie covering the subject of the pinewood derby called "Down and Derby".  Enjoy   BUAIDH - NO - BAS
















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