Our car won the hearts of many at this year's IDSA 2006 Derby race. The design is essentially an upside down "U" with a large open area through the middle to allow easy air flow, but essentially eliminates the most obvious place to use to add essential weight to the car.
 
Materials
 
Our solution to house the weight element led us to create a symmetrical design that would sandwich tungsten rods between the two panels. With a little luck on ebay and a motivated seller, we acquired several boxes of pure tungsten welding rods, which is 70% more dense than lead! The other materials we found include a perfect piece of Honduras Rosewood that is almost exactly the same density as acrylic and aluminum finished to a mirror polish to add some contrast.
 
Engineering, Fabrication, and Finishing
 
All of the parts (Honduras Rosewood side panels and crossbars, aluminum interior panels, aluminum center stripe, aluminum logo/numbering badges, brass top weights, and clear Polycarbonate wheels) were custom machined in house on our CNC mill. Since this machine is computer controlled (after the program is written and input) much of this work took place during overnight hours. Yeah, yeah, but how did you do?
 
Our car was considerably faster than last year's entry, but the cars with the fancy mechanical concepts ruled the track this year. We finished strong with a tie for 5th place, and by far had the fastest car that merely rolled down the track. While the cars with the mechanical wizardry seemed to garner the most fan attention, there was something about the look of the wood that people liked. That and the surprising heft kept bringing people back. At a final weight of 9lbs, 6oz our car was the 2nd heaviest entry, yet it appeared as if it would be one of the lightest. Next year we'll hone one of our original mechanical concepts in hopes of winning an award for speed. This year we'll have to settle for the "Peoples Choice" award.