The annual event drew a total of 23 racers – 11 in the senior division, 12 in the juniors – with Overby, 8, coming away with the Rookie of the Year honour in the junior class.
And even though his trips down Alder Avenue hill were among his first ever in a soap box derby car, the strategy of it all was something he quickly caught on to.
“When you’re racing in junior you never want to be laying back, you want to be as far forward as possible, then you get more speed,” Overby said of his strategy throughout the day of races.
“Then it’s only a three-quarter of an inch steering, and since the road bends in the middle and is lower down on the sides, you have to turn to the inside or you’ll hit people or go off course… they’re not hard to drive but they’re a lot of fun.”
That’s the whole idea of the day, said long-time Derby organizer Heather Carle – getting the kids out and having a great time while learning a bit about racing at the same time.
“It was really good, we had 23 racers, everything went really well, there were no accidents and the whole day ran pretty smoothly,” Carle said. “There were some really good races, too, which always makes things fun.”
The sole issue of the day came with the timing system and those close races: organizers ended up using video to determine the winner of the closest battles, and sometimes even that wasn’t enough.
“When you have some races where the difference can be .05 of a second, that’s pretty tough to decide,” Carle said. “So we had to re-run a few races but that just meant everyone had more fun.”
An interesting highlight came from the Moose Jaw Police Service being on site with a radar gun to check out just how fast the cars were actually travelling. The final verdict? Junior cars topped out at around 41 kilometres per hour at the finish line, with the sleeker and heavier senior cars hitting the 48 km/h mark.
Overby will in fact be making the jump to the quicker cars next year, something he’s looking forward to.
“It’s a lot different, I haven’t tried a senior car yet, but they’re pretty fast and they look like they’ll be a lot of fun,” he said.
The junior division was won by Easton Perrault, with Kaleb Snyder finishing second and Sophia Laverdiere third. The Sportsmanship award was won by Juli Finlay, with Zayden Dussalt claiming the Grease Monkey award, Emmitt Meyer the Hard Luck award and Overby his rookie of the year honour.
Joshua Laverdiere finished first in the senior class, just ahead of Aiden Jahnke in second and Serenity Laverdiere in third. Hayden Perrault won the Sportsmanship award, Jacob Dickson the Grease Monkey award and Cailey Nagy the Hard Luck award.
