“My first reaction was a smile because I was surprised,”  says Cooper Fasnacht, a third grader at Pine Grove Area Elementary.   On August 24, 2019 Fasnacht of Pine Grove, PA helped to break the Guinness World Record of the longest Hot Wheels track and 2,176 feet later the World Record was broken. 

“It was my dad’s idea and he knew I liked Hot Wheels Tracks,” says Cooper.  His dad (Ryan Fasnacht) brought the idea up to him and he thought it would be a lot of fun.  Alfred Benesch, Cooper, and his dad all worked together to build the track of 2,176 feet and 2 inches.  It took 1,346 pieces of 10 foot sections in total. The track was built in two workshops on Buckhorn Road in Foster Township, PA.  There is a 200 feet vertical drop that goes an average of 8 mph and 15 mph max speed. “We didn’t come against any issues while building the track,” says Cooper. The process was very smooth all the way up to the end. Cooper started the car at the beginning of the track at 0:28 seconds and the car ended at the end of the track at 3:02 seconds. With the hard work of everyone put together they finally broke the World’s Longest Hot Wheels Track of 2019. 

In the past, the record was broken at about 1,941 feet by a NASCAR champion Joey Lagono. Building just a Hot Wheels Track takes a lot of time. This project falls into STEM because of all of the work put into it. Science is a huge part of building the track because you have to know the physics to see how fast and high the track has to be. Technology is a big deal because you can use it to come up with the design of the track. You have to have a plan of how to build the track and technology helps with that. Engineering plays a role because that all comes down to putting the track together and attaching all of the pieces. And finally mathematics, this is important because you need to know how many pieces you need, how much everything will cost, and how long the track is. For kids like Cooper to get to help build the track is awesome, but he’s also getting taught a lot of information along the way. Learning about STEM and how it works at such a young age is terrific.