Initial Contact
When you first reach out to us, we will ask you to email us the following information:
- A primary point of contact:
- name
- cell number
- Details of your event:
- date
- time
- address
- The sponsoring organization:
- pack #
- troop
- company name
- A rough estimate of the number of people racing.
We’ll work from there to get you a firm location on our calendar.
Several Weeks Before The Event
You will want to ensure that all of your racers are informed of the rules for your event. Since there are no official centralized rules for the pinewood derby it’s important that you settle on a set of rules that works for you and that everyone is made aware of what they are. Our rules page can help you there. Note that while we can be very flexible with rules, there are at least some minimal requirements listed there that we insist you don’t deviate from to keep from damaging our equipment.
At Least One Day Before The Event
Many organizers choose to schedule a preliminary event a day or two before the race for racers to check in their cars. This gives you an opportunity to check that all cars are compliant well before the event and allows the event to start on time even if some people arrive late or can’t make the scheduled time.
We strongly suggest that you get a list of racers to us at least one day before the event.
This gives us time to enter them all into our spreadsheet ahead of time. It ensures that we get names spelled correctly and it saves A LOT of time if we don’t have to scramble to type everyone in at the start of the event.
Our software is just an Excel spreadsheet (with some special programming attached) so it’s very easy for us to make last minute changes, deletions or additions, but it’s just easier all around if we don’t have to do too much of that while we’re getting ready to start your event.
The easiest and best way for you to do this is to email us a spreadsheet with your racers in it.
Suggested Spreadsheet Format
At your event, we will run your racers in heats (usually organized by dens or age groups). Then we will take the top 3 from each of those heats and run them in a championship heat.
For that to go as smoothly as possible, we like to use a numbering system where each car is assigned a number. The hundreds place indicates which preliminary heat the car belongs to and the tens and ones places are used to identify each car within that heat. For example, say you have 3 cars in your first heat. They would be numbered 101, 102, and 103. Then the 4 cars in your second heat would be numbered 201, 202, 203, and 204. And so on.
It’s very common for each race entry to consist of:
- the car number
- the racer’s name
- the car’s name
- their den (if it’s a cub scout pack) or other grouping (this is optional, especially if you follow the numbering system we suggested above)
Your spreadsheet might look something like this:
Please understand that the list of names you provide to us ahead of time does NOT need to be final. It’s probably easiest for you if you provide us with your complete roster, regardless of who you think might participate. If anyone isn’t ready to race on the day of your event, we can simply delete them from our spreadsheet. And if anyone shows up on the day of the event who wasn’t on the list, it’s an easy thing for us to add them. What we want to avoid is having to type everything in at the last minute.
One Hour Before The Event
We’ll arrive at your facility with our gear and expect to meet with your contact person who will let us in to the building so we can begin setting everything up.
And that will lead us to what will happen During The Race.
