The Riggle Family: Pinewood Derby

So, Ethan belongs to a group at our church called the Royal Rangers. It is a lot like the boy scouts, only with a Christian basis. It's a pretty cool program and the kids work on projects, go on trips and have different events. The latest is the pinewood derby. Derek and Ethan decided to make two cars so they went to the store and bought two matchbook cars that Ethan liked and started shaping the car kits to match the matchbook cars. Eventually Derek read the rules and realized that if they wanted the cars to look as cool as they wanted they wouldn't be eligible for racing, so they got another kit to make a race car. Ethan did a lot of the work on the race car, most of the work actually with Derek guiding him on what to do. It was a pretty cool little car. Then Derek decided that they should focus on just one more car and Ethan decided he wanted it to look like a police car. Ethan definately helped on the police car but not as much as with the race car. They both ended up looking pretty dang cool.

So, on race day, they found out that Ethan could only race one car, although they had made the police car to racing standards, so they only entered the race car into the race itself and entered the police car into the show category. Ethan's car did pretty well in the race. He lost his first race, won two races and then lost the fourth race. It was double elimination so after the fourth race his care was out. He had good times but raced against cars that had even better times so he didn't place in the race. I don't know that he would have placed, but he might have if the races were based off of times instead of winners, but he was good with it. My mom and I watched the judges looking at the cars for the race category and overheard a little of the discussion about the cars they liked. It appeared that they weren't paying any attention to Ethan's car at all so we tried to get Ethan ready to not have won. But then they listed off the results and Ethan won in the show category. His car is pretty cool. So now his police car is set to be in the sectionals in March against other outposts of Royal Rangers. We were pretty excited about it and so was he.

After the awards ceremony we asked if Ethan could race his cars and they let him. His police car ended up being almost as fast as his race car. It was pretty cool.

So, I am including some pictures of him and his cars for you. I will have some other pictures up in a few days for you but I want to make sure Ethan gets all of his glory for his car racing.

Derek and Ethan before the race