Buy it.

Poor little Cub Scouts. I have your answer. Homemade cars will not cut it in 2007.

In our last installment, the question was, do you buy your cars?

The answer is, yes. Yes you do. (Assuming you want to win..)

The Cub Scouts spent their den meetings building cars. For weeks on end, they were sawing, sanding, painting, and enjoying themselves. Tools were shared, designs were admired, the kids were having a good time.

It was fun standing around with the other dads, occasionally we would offer a word of encouragement, or maybe help out with a tricky cut with the coping saw. One dad did not join us in our little group. One dad joined the dark side.

He spent time the same way I did, looking online at kits and designs and whatnot.

However, instead of coming to my conclusion, which was to let the kids build their cars on their own, he decided to buy one. It looked great. All it needed was some paint.

Instead of letting his Cub Scout paint the car, the Dad would let his Cub Scout watch the car get painted. Maybe it is our own fault, none of the Dads that witnessed this spoke up. We let him push his son out of the way so his son could not ruin Dad's pinewood derby car.

In the end it was a fantastic racer. It beat all of the other cars with no problem.

It had the best paint job and won best in show.

They went on to race in the district pinewood derby races.

It reminded me of the story of the able bodied athlete that went and raced the contestants at the Special Olympics. He won. Nobody was surprised that he won. But at the end of the day, all he had done was beaten a bunch of handicapped people.

Sure, this guy bought his racer, painted it up, and won the races. I am glad that a 30 year old was able to beat out a group of 8 year olds.

It is funny, when they took that racer to district, they did not even place. I guess district is where all the 30 year olds race each other, and some other 30 year old did a better job with his application of knowledge gained from the pinewood derby websites.

I prefer to let the kids be kids and build and race their own cars. Lets have an adults only race on another day, and leave the Cub Scouts to race each other.