Deer Park Girl Speeds To 10th Place In Derby

Annie Robinson has a need for speed.

“Get in, hang on, sit down and shut up,” said Robinson, 12.

Robinson’s high-velocity philosophy worked last week when she placed 10th in the 58th annual All-American Soapbox Derby’s stock division.

Competing against 160 racers from the Phillipines, Germany, Austria and the United States, Robinson missed placing ninth and winning money by an inch in a photo finish.

“It was pouring (rain), I couldn’t see and I was all over the road,” Robinson, an eighth-grader at Deer Park Middle School, said apologetically.

Some racers at the derby in Akron, Ohio, were clocked at 35 mph. Robinson was clocked at 33 mph on Spokane’s Post Street hill during this summer’s local soapbox derby.

That’s a bit slower than her idol, stock car driver Kyle Petty, but seeing pavement scream by in her gravity-powered roadster is Robinson’s idea of a good time.

“Almost every … competition (I like) has to do with speed,” said Robinson, who also enjoys downhill ski races.

She says she relishes her tomboy label. She hates wearing dresses and “dressing up like a girl.”

She tried to turn out for quarterback on Deer Park Middle School’s football team but was told to walk over to softball tryouts.

“Personally, I think it makes boys jealous that I’m better at things than they are,” said Robinson, who says she scores most of the touchdowns during lunchtime football games at school. “I think they were jealous because I knew how to play football better than they.”

, DataTimes