Idyll Banter by Chris Bohjalian Page B

STRESS, THE JOY
OF THE RACE
    IN A SHORT RACE, a thousandth of a second can make all the difference: the difference between a fleeting but precious moment inside the winner’s circle, and a lifetime outside it, wondering . . . What if?
    And so, despite the fact that his first race is only minutes away, Steve Schubart decides his vehicle needs more weight. With a borrowed steel washer, Scotch tape, and a little faith, he and his race-day mechanic bring the car up to 140.7 grams—still a legal machine, but a weighty one.
    I ask him if the track looks fast this brisk March afternoon, but Schubart’s a veteran. “It’s the car that counts,” he says simply.
    A moment later, Schubart and his machine—a worker bee of a race car, an earth-tone, pine-colored rocket with more heart than hieroglyphics—are behind the starting peg.
    And then the races begin. In a series of head-to-head contests, Schubart’s car sizzles down the short course, dueling racers known throughout the circuit for speed. Guys like Mike Truchon, this year behind a dark red machine with lightning bolts on the hood so vivid you can sense the way the car will explode down the track. Or Brian Mayo, whose silver racer looks so powerful one spectator in the crowd murmurs approvingly, “Give that thing enough fuel and I’ll bet it goes into orbit.”
    Schubart will never know if the washer—a flat piece of metal roughly the size of a city subway token—made the difference. The races were close, two with Mayo so tight that not even the video cameras and stopwatches surrounding the finish line could determine a winner.
    But, in the end, Steve Schubart’s gritty car squeaked out a few key victories, and he took first place in the Webelo Den, and third place overall in Lincoln Cub Scout Pack 633’s Pinewood Derby.
    The March 23 race, held in Lincoln’s Burnham Hall, is a warm-up of sorts for the Cub Scout District’s annual Pinewood Derby in Middlebury on April 27. But just as the Olympic trials for many athletes can mean as much as one moment in time in Athens, Greece, or a year in the minors can mean as much as a week in what’s called the Major League Show, last Saturday’s Lincoln Derby was an emotional competition.
    Sportsmanship always won out over standings, but that doesn’t mean the races weren’t tense.
    The Cub Scouts, all six- to ten-year-olds, had taken identical blocks of nondescript pine and identical plastic wheels, and—perhaps with a little help from Mom or Dad—built their own deeply personal, highly idiosyncratic cars. Of the fifteen racing machines that graced the starting pegs, no two looked as if they were from the same automotive genus or species, or inspired by the same issue of
Cub Scout Car and Driver.
My personal favorite? Six-year-old Bryn Paul made the conscious decision to sacrifice aerodynamics for accuracy, and gave his car a Play-Doh and pipe-cleaner driver.
    And each boy brought to the Derby the hope that his car would speed over the thirty-two-foot maple track first and electrify the Burnham Hall crowd. “I love the Derby,” says Don Gale, whose son Schuyler is a part of the Pack’s Wolf Den. “It’s Thunder Road without the noise.”
    But each also brought a tremendous sense of camaraderie, the sort of friendship in which fairness mattered more than who finally won.
    In the Schubart/Mayo face-offs for the Webelo blue ribbon—two so close that a third was needed to determine the winner—it wasn’t one of the adult judges who finally awarded the victory to Steve Schubart.
    It was Brian Mayo. Even in that third race, Mayo’s and Schubart’s cars seemed to cross the finish line simultaneously, and the judges were about to insist on a fourth race. But with a voice as filled with enthusiasm as when he’d first entered the hall with his car and his hopes, Mayo called out the words that symbolized the spirit