On June 23, 20 Soap Box Derby cars will race down Main Street, a new spin on an event from the town’s past that promises to bring generations together.
In the stretch leading up to last year’s inaugural Bel Air Town Derby, Ben Meyer started “trash talking.”
“I was trying to stir up some energy,” the Vagabond Sandwich Co. owner said. His derby car, piloted by a boy from Meyer’s neighborhood in Bel Air, sped down Main Street in late October bearing the sandwich shop’s logo and orange flames, and propelled only by gravity.
It didn’t win a single race. But this year, he’ll have a second shot at leaving the competition in the dust.
The Bel Air Town Derby, a soap box derby-style racing event hosted by the Bel Air Lions Club, is returning to Main Street June 23 — with double the number of participants as the town celebrates its 150th anniversary this year.
The race is a new tradition that harks back to a spectacle not seen in Bel Air for more than a half-century, uniting residents of different generations in the process.
“In today’s environment, where people are just so busy … this is a really neat way of bringing the community back together,” said Bel Air Town Administrator Edward Hopkins.
A town official floated the idea for a derby to the Bel Air Lions Club around the beginning of 2023, said Lions member Dave Guzewich, who took on the responsibility of organizing the Bel Air Town Derby with fellow member Amy Biondi.
“We’ll give it a try,” Guzewich, 73, recalled saying.
The new wave of races — though they use official Soap Box Derby cars — isn’t sanctioned by the Soap Box Derby organization, meaning the winners in Bel Air don’t advance to compete in championship races, Guzewich explained.
But the Bel Air races in the 1960s started by the Optimist Club were.
At 12 years old, Forest Hill’s Larry Harkins flew down Main Street one summer day. He emerged the winner in his first and only time competing in the Bel Air Soap Box Derby in 1966.
“When you’re first going down Main Street, you’re just sort of sitting up, steering the car and looking around,” said Harkins, now 70 and living in Street. As the heats became more competitive, racers hunched down to make themselves more aerodynamic.
Back when he competed, Harkins said it was a boys-only sport. He spent 200 hours building his own wooden car and was awarded a $500 savings bond — plus a chance to compete in the national derby held in Akron, Ohio, The Aegis reported.
Harkins was eliminated in his first heat in Ohio, a race that The Aegis reported brought together 250 boys from across the country and abroad. But he still remembers a police escort welcoming him and his parents to town, after which “two cheerleaders come up and kiss you on the cheek.”
He’s held onto the trophy given to him in Bel Air, and last year served as the honorary starter for the first race of the day.
“The nostalgia of it takes you back to more of a small town America, a place where all of your neighbors and community get together to do stuff on a weekend day and you all kinda know each other,” Biondi, 41, said. “It’s a way for an older generation to really start plugging in with a newer generation. … To me it’s way more than Soap Box.”
Ten cars sponsored by local businesses, organizations and individuals raced down Main Street in late October for last year’s derby. Har-co Credit Union emerged as the winner, taking home a plaque and a trophy for the driver. Guzewich said the top speed was 18 miles per hour.
The wheels and kits to assemble the official Soap Box Derby cars, the shells of which Guzewich said are now made of fiberglass, cost $1,000 per car. They can be steered only minimally — there’s a butterfly-shaped steering wheel that can be turned ever so slightly — and have brakes but no engines.
“These are not your grandmother’s, your grandpa’s cars anymore,” he said.
In June, 20 cars will face off on the gentle slope of Main Street from Office Street to Lee Street, competing two at a time in a double-elimination bracket, with an additional consolation bracket. Kids must be ages 9 to 14 to participate, Guzewich said, and the total weight of the car and the driver can’t exceed 200 pounds.
“The more you practice, the better you are,” said Tricia Miller, who owns Crabby Axe Throwing in Bel Air and bought a car to participate in last year’s derby.
A Crabby Axe Throwing coach’s two 9-year-old nephews took turns racing in October, said Miller, who lives in Forest Hill. Their car — wrapped with the Crabby Axe Throwing logo and the kids’ drawings, and paired with a helmet that has a toy axe sticking daringly out of the top — won a trophy for being the “coolest car” in town.
“We had a blast,” said Miller, 51, whose business is sponsoring this year’s Winners Circle.
Last year, she said the young drivers practiced going down hills in the car leading up to the derby and built it with help from Miller’s own adult sons. They’ll practice again this year, though Miller said the coach’s nephews will likely split up their duties so that one is the driver and the other acts as the pit crew.
Bryan Sutton, the owner of Deer Creek Exteriors, the title sponsor of this year’s and last year’s derby, spent a few days assembling and readying his car last year with help from his son, Wyatt, and an employee.
Wyatt, now 15, was too tall to fit in the car, Sutton said. Instead, his Taekwondo instructor’s son raced, and will again this year.
“We wanted to win, but it was just a good time,” said Sutton, 50, noting with a laugh that his car placed in the bottom the first time around. “It’s a nice afternoon. It’s something different. … It brings everybody together.”
Meyer, whose restaurant is this year’s Finish Line Sponsor, also had to find someone other than his children — who are too young to participate — to race his car in the derby. A kid in his Bel Air neighborhood named James stepped up.
“At the bus stop one morning I just said, ‘Who wants to ride in the car?’” Meyer recalled. “The next couple weeks, they’d all take turns sitting in it to see if they fit.”
He compared sitting in the car to sitting in a kayak, and didn’t know yet in April who would be driving his car this time around.
“I need to find someone little that can kind of disappear” inside the car, he said.
Meyer, who is the president of the Bel Air Downtown Alliance board of directors, said he joined the Bel Air Lions Club to help promote the derby.
Last year’s road closure for the derby extended beyond where the race took place, leaving some businesses with no activity in front of them, he said.
This year, organizers anticipate a bigger turnout. We Rock the Spectrum Kid’s Gym will be on site with a bus full of activities to keep young children busy, Biondi said, and a Harford County company called STEAM Quest Kits will offer science and math activities. There will also be Taekwondo demonstrations and a chance for attendees to leave their mark on a large community painting project by Bel Air High School.
“We’re always looking for ways to create new events that will bring folks to the town,” said Hopkins, who remembers watching the derby races of the 60s and would like to see the new races become an annual tradition.
“I want my children and grandchildren, and hopefully great-grandchildren, to see how much fun I had as a kid.”
As for the newest crop of young derby racers, Harkins’s advice is simple: “Keep your head down and go straight. That’s about it.”
