Cool dad breaks Hot Wheels record

Maybe your company had a great program for this year's Take Your Child To Work Day. But did you set a world record?

Ford Motor Co. set out to do just that on April 23, following the lead of dynamometer technician Matt West and his 6-year-old son Blade's love for Hot Wheels cars and Hot Wheels' iconic orange plastic racing track.

West and a team set up a 12-foot-high loop in the three-story atrium of Ford's Research and Innovation Center in Dearborn, Mich., then let kids send their favorite model cars down the track and around a full 360 degrees.

“It started as a part-fun, part-physics lesson with my son at home,” West said in a news release. “We built one in our playroom, then built a 5-foot tall loop in our backyard. When people at Ford heard what we were up to, everyone thought it would be a great way to get young people excited about science and engineering by trying to break the world record on Take Your Child to Work Day.”

To set a new standard, Ford had to beat the existing record of 9 feet, 9 inches tall set in Ohio. West and his team successfully built a 12-foot, 6-inch loop.

“On a track, a Hot Wheels car can only go so fast, so carrying the momentum of the vehicle through the entire loop is harder than you might think,” West said.

The first attempts failed to make the full loop, but the engineers (assisted by a crew from TechShop Detroit) kept trying. The first car to make it through? A model of a silver Ford Torino.

(Thanks to News Editor Rhoda Miel for today's blog post).