For the Record: 28:50 - A journey toward self-discovery and the Cannonball Run Record

by Ed Bolian

  My parents are amazing people. It has been said they did not say “No” often enough to me but I think they are terrific parents. Both are engineers, intellectuals, and devoted Christians. They gave me every example and opportunity I could have asked for to live a well-adjusted, normal life. I missed that boat or at least routinely steered it off course. Fortunately they loved each other and loved me through the many ridiculous detours.

  Most parents try to teach their kids to work hard. Mine wanted me to work smart and know what I was talking about. Soon enough I was good at one and proficient at faking the other. They raised me to be confident, set goals, and make decisions well. I am not sure they realized exactly how those traits might manifest. The process of developing an ability to solve problems in my own way led to some friction with most authority figures in my path and had some unique implications through my life.

  I became an avid consumer of car culture. The criterion of car enthusiast movies was building quickly at the time. Historic greats like Bullitt, The Italian Job, Gumball Rally, Vanishing Point, and Cannonball Run were being joined by modern interpretations and remakes in Gone in Sixty Seconds, The Fast and the Furious franchise, a new Batman trilogy, and a remake of The Italian Job. There were also some phenomenal car cameos in The Rock, Bad Boys, and The Transporter. From an entertainment consumption perspective it was a highpoint of exotic car film appearances. This was beautifully augmented by the dawn of amateur created film projects and internet publication of poorly shot and badly edited clips. Teckademics & the Mischief franchise were documenting events like the Gumball 3000 and grassroots street racing which added to the allure of long distance competitive driving. The juggernaut of Top Gear was also just gaining traction in both the US and UK markets.

  When I was a freshman in high school I was given an invitation to learn what real pain felt like. I was diagnosed with a very rare knee disorder called Bilateral Osteochondritis Dissecans Disease. It is a deterioration of the outer chondyles of each of my femurs. Essentially, in the area where your femur comes down to meet your tibia in the knee joint it splits into two lobes. On the outer lobe, or chondyle, my bones started to crumble away. Sometimes the bit of cartilage that remained in place worked to maintain stability, sometimes it did not. Regardless, it caused excruciating pain and would have had me in a wheelchair by age thirty if not surgically addressed. It would take me an hour to loosen my knees and stretch before a basketball game in order to be able to run due to the inflammation. The only solution was a cadaver bone and cartilage tissue transplant from a dead, but otherwise healthy, donor close to my age and height. I could not have imagined it then, but ten years later I would sell the guy who harvested the cadaver tissue in my knees a brand new Lamborghini Gallardo LP550-2 Spyder.

  The knee surgeries were a lot for a kid to go through but it gave me an opportunity to bury myself deeper into automotive lifestyle and folklore. I had six surgeries and learned a valuable lesson about what I was capable of enduring. I love the stories of people going through boot camp or their first tour of military service. What I went through was not like that at all, with the exception of one psychological aspect. Being thrust into something difficult or painful without much understanding of what you should anticipate tends to reveal some interesting things about what you are capable of surviving.

  Sports had been a big part of my life. The knee issues ended my AAU Basketball career and, from a medical standpoint, swimming was the only athletic pursuit that was an option. I hated swimming. To me it is a boring, pointless activity unless you add sharks or alligators to the mix. Unfortunately, I was pretty good at it. My six and a half foot body and high capacity lungs were even more useful stroking through a pool than dunking a basketball. I endured four years of varsity high school and club swimming. The potential was there to swim in college but it sounded as appetizing as another round of knee surgery. I retired happily to the hot tub.

  I must admit daily swimming was a great time for deep thinking. There is nothing more mindless than paddling back and forth in a shallow pool looking at a line on the bottom of it. You have a lot of time for meditative introspection lap after lap. I remember just how lonely life at that stage could feel and how I wanted to achieve something in my existence that would be interesting. When the name Ed Bolian came up in conversations among my friends, I wanted the next sentence to be, “Oh yeah, the guy who __________.” That blank needed to be something incredible. The adolescent urge to be distinctive was in full force.

  Of course swimming was not immune from my efforts to push boundaries. Partially out of the controlled deviance of it, partially out of still trying to win, and partially out of the ridiculously alien sensation of it - I would convince a few of my teammates to cover our bodies in petroleum jelly before our swim meets. We would leave our shins and the undersides of our arms clear of it to maintain traction with the water. Elsewhere the water would bead off us like the hand waxed finish of an unreliable British Sports Car whose non-running ownership value lay redemptively in weekend polishing sessions.

  If you have never taken a dive into a cold pool covered in Vaseline I highly recommend it. You won’t be able to bathe normally for a week and the subsequent skin breakouts are a con but the feeling has got to be similar to being shot out of a cannon. It is ten times more effective than shaving your body.

  It is worth spending a moment here to discuss something that materialized in my adolescence - an absolute inability to respect anyone or anything. I am not really sure where this started. I remember rebuking teachers into tears, breaking rules if only for the sake of doing so, and pushing against any line or limit that I could find. It was an elitist attitude that I didn’t understand but it made me a very unlikeable person for a few years while in high school. It may have stemmed from the repeated pain of knee surgeries, the daunting challenges of academic future, or some flaw within me I had yet to admit existed.

  I find it very difficult to maintain a peaceful relationship with my superiors in a work environment. I do not accept criticism well and my gut response to a rule or imposition is always to think of how far it can be pushed. There is some dark passenger inside of me that simply reacts badly to anything aiming to restrict me. I can say now this flaw is still a part of me but I have found better ways to keep it in check. I never knew what purpose my flaw served but I always hoped it might contribute to me doing something interesting down the road.

  The path of youthful self discovery and soul searching led to the formulation of a life recipe. I wanted my life’s goals to be a mixture 2 parts eccentricity, 1 part creativity, 1 part deviance, a splash of significance with a nod to historical precedent, garnished with some exotic flair of exhibitionism, filtered through some obstacle I felt like most others would not have the balls to pass through. It would be served, of course, in a glass of some sort of competitive victory. Evidence could indicate I was just a degree or two removed from either being a serial killer or confidence man. Or a lion tamer.

  School came easy but motivation did not. I took a litany of Advanced Placement and high level courses in high school hoping to gain admittance into an Ivy League school. After applying to most of them I found out coming from an unheard of public Georgia High School; even an experienced entrepreneur and swim team captain with a high SAT & GPA who had overcome a debilitating physical condition was not going to get much attention from the admittance teams. In the end I was admitted to Georgia Tech where I eventually figured I would study public policy. The thinking was that if I didn’t end up working for myself in some capacity, I would just go work for the CIA.

  I did not pay a lot of attention in school. I blatantly read car magazines most of the time rather than listening to the lectures. I did well enough in the classes to get away with it but most of my thoughts went constantly to cars, businesses with cars, and driving cars. Every assignment I could bend towards cars and driving went straight there. The backs of each notebook page were filled with ideas for car clubs, driving experiences
, and illegal road races.

  One of the preposterous schemes was to get my grandmother to parlay the funds from a real estate investment into the newly announced Bugatti Veyron around 2003. The world beating McLaren F1 had appreciated strongly and buying what was guaranteed to be the new fastest car in the world seemed like a great idea. I set up a phone call with the CEO of Bugatti to discuss my interest in the car and my concerns about its approach to market. My barely post-pubescent deep voice came in quite handy. They sent me a letter guaranteeing my allocation of the car and set up an appointment for me to fly to Molsheim, France for seat and pedal fitting. When my grandmother decided hypercar speculation was not for her I set up a deal with a German exotic car dealer to sell my guaranteed spot for $100,000. The deal with their retail buyer fell apart but it was a great lesson in the art of faking it until you make it.

  Eleven years later, as he sipped a cappuccino I had made him that he called “the best I have tasted in America,” I shared that story with the very Italian but newly named President of Bugatti. He seemed amused but it was probably the coffee talking. My Lamborghini salesman barista skills were probably more impressive than the childhood schemes.

  The first thought I had to start an exotic car rental company was in a conversation with my best friend, Kevin Messer. We both loved cars and we had heard about companies in Miami and Los Angeles that would rent them. The idea was born. The first fleet we thought about was a Diablo 6.0, Bentley Arnage, Ferrari 360, and Dodge Viper. Only one of these ended up making the final cut.

  At the time, the automotive landscape was changing fast. In 2000, there were only a few impressive performance cars sold in the US. The E39 BMW M5 had a naturally aspirated 400 hp V8, the Porsche 996 Twin Turbo had 415 gargantuan hp and would go 0-60 in 3.9 seconds, and the Ferrari 360 Modena was emerging as the first truly usable supercar boasting 400 hp. The Corvette Z06 was on the horizon with 405 hp but the standard C5 Corvette was still an underwhelming performance car despite being great looking.

  2003 and 2004 changed all of that - we got the Bentley Continental GT, Lamborghini Gallardo, Porsche Carrera GT, Ferrari Enzo, Mercedes McLaren SLR, Maserati came back to the US, Cadillac brought out the CTS-V, and Mercedes got into the true performance car game with 469 and 493 horsepower variants of a 5.4 liter supercharged V8 and a twin turbo V12 that they packed into several models. You could get a mid sized E Class, a convertible SL, a full-sized S Class, or a 2+2 CL coupe with a forced induction engine that would outperform just about anything else on the road, all while offering massaging seats and understated looks. It was a strange proposition to most wealthy prospects but a lightning fast Q-car could surely fit some niche.

  I took it upon myself to figure out which of these cars were the best. While still a kid in high school, I would call up a car dealership that had one of these cars for sale, explain the nature of my business, being the breeding of exotic and interesting reptiles, and express my interest in purchasing a car. Of course their expectation of an immediate timetable for purchase might have been implied but I never had to lie to get to test drive the cars. I drove virtually every model of Ferrari, Lamborghini, Porsche, Bentley, Audi, BMW, Mercedes, Maserati, and others and began to grasp what the selection of luxury and exotic cars and the people who surrounded them looked like.

  I remember learning the ins and outs of the modern day sequential manual gearboxes in a Cambiocorsa Maserati Spyder. I decided to see if it could be forced into first gear going fairly quickly around a ninety degree turn. It could. The car immediately kicked into a powerslide with a trajectory soon to intersect with an oncoming Ford F350. Somehow, through no learned skill of my own, I was able to right the car and point it where we wanted it to go. The utterly terrified salesman expressed his intense appreciation for my interest but asked that I return to the dealership in a slightly more conservative manner. As always, I found some convenient reason the car just wasn’t for me at the time.

  I had eBay alerts set up for anytime someone would list an interesting car for sale in the Atlanta area. I would call them during free time at school and go test drive the cars before swim practice, always offering some excuse not to consummate the purchase that day. One day a Ferrari 360 Spider popped up for sale as the personal car of the owner of a Toyota Dealership in my hometown. They were still selling at prices $100,000 over MSRP with eternal waits to get a new one. Our local Ferrari dealer was never very friendly to tourists so I had not been able to talk them into letting me drive one. I rang the Toyota dealer and took it for a spin. Hundreds of hours watching Top Gear, reading technical specifications in car magazines, and playing video games meant I was more versed on the car than the salesman. You can imagine his excitement at the possibility of selling the boss’s $300,000 supercar as a departure from the mundane routine of Priuses sprinkled with the occasional Scion Xb. I showed him how the car worked and we drove and drove. We ran out of gas on the way back to the dealership and had to push/coast our way in.

  When it rained I would test drive lightweight rear wheel drive sports cars like Honda S2000s, BMW M3s, and big engine Mercedes to hone my drifting abilities and to scare unsuspecting salespeople. I never would guess that a decade or so later I would be deflecting the same propositions from unqualified leads as a salesman of supercars.

  The cars were great and the journalistic writing of the day was fantastic. For all of the multi-car shootout tests, fastest lap driving, drag times, and other metrics - the point that you couldn’t test the capabilities of these cars out on a real road was present in every single article.

  “Why not?” my 17 year old self kept asking. “I am glad that they can lap the Nurburgring quickly and it is great that they go from 0-60 so impressively, but which one could I drive the 590 mile trip to North Palm Beach the fastest in?” That was practical. That was interesting. It could be any road trip for that matter. How do I enjoy the drives that we do every single day? I thought of a cross country race. What cities would be interesting? Detroit, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Seattle, Atlanta? It had to be coast to coast. That sounded right. New York to Los Angeles then. That is America in a nutshell with cars. What could be better?

  Offering gearheads admittance into a no holds barred cross country race sounded like selling picnic baskets to bears. The competitive proposition was simple but the problem solving strategies would be fascinatingly diverse. It seemed like the best game ever. I went home and told my father about the idea. He said, “Oh, you mean Cannonball? Yeah, that sounds like you. They did that thirty years ago. There are movies about it.”

  Mind blown, straight to Best Buy I went to get all of the DVD’s I could find on the mysterious Cannonball.

  My research led me to Brock Yates, a contributor to Car & Driver Magazine and the founder of this outlaw brand of cross country balls-to-the-wall street racing. Thirty-five or so years prior he had been sitting somewhere thinking the same thoughts I mulled over while in my high school chemistry class, and he decided an outlaw cross country race was a worthwhile endeavor. He was the Godfather of the dream which had just been ignited in my teenage brain.

  I learned about the spirit of the idea, how Yates and his friends wanted to thumb their noses at the establishment and protest the imposition of a national speed limit. He had an idea for the creation of a Masters Level driving license and believed that well trained drivers in capable cars should be able to drive faster than an average Joe in an average car.

  I was astonished to find out how many legitimate racecar drivers and teams had competed in the Cannonball. The cars were amazing, the people were interesting, the idea was endlessly compelling - I was hooked. People living ordinary lives had procured the most powerful high performance cars of the day, outfitted them with cutting edge gadgetry, and conducted an endurance test of both steed and operator through the unknowable frontier of the American highway system. I dove into dissecting the idea and thinking about what it would look like in the context of modern cars on today’s roads. Many sle
epless nights followed.

  In my last semester of high school I took a class where I could define my own course requirements and content, pointed toward a large scale research project on a subject of interest. We were supposed to define a curriculum and an evaluation scale for ourselves. There was to be some field research and an interview with someone who was influential in the area of study.

  I was continuing my habit of test driving as often as I could and felt like I was becoming quite the amateur authority on the latest crop of sports cars. I chose to investigate the profession of automotive journalism for the project. The expert in the field that I chose to interview was Brock Yates.

  Chapter 2

  The Interview

  The sales manager at the car dealership where I work from 2009-15 is named Bill Smith. Bill is one of my favorite people. He is as American as an apple pie shaped country music guitar being used as a baseball bat at Yankee stadium on the 4th of July by Miss America wearing daisy dukes atop the shoulders of Abraham Lincoln in an Elvis impersonator getup. He hates technology, loves the bumpy road of a past that has made him who he is, and is full of some of the best one liners and wisdom that you could ever find in a person. One of my favorite things to hear him regularly say is, “Why can’t I just wake up and it be 1979 again?”

  The 1970s in America was a crazy time. The idea of freedom was in the air and the national psyche was one of collectively testing limits, experimenting, and trying to build an identity in a collective fashion. I was born in 1985 and it sounds like I missed out on an era custom tailored for my mindset by just a few decades.

  This was on the tail end of a glorious time for the American car culture and something that we will likely never see again. NASCAR racing had come out of the 1930’s North Carolina bootlegging culture and had made its way into showrooms. This was the ideal racecar/road car selling relationship that every car manufacturer still wants. “Win on Sunday, sell on Monday” meant that showrooms of the 1960’s were filled with cars that actually resembled the ones that were screaming around the super speedways, just without all of the stickers.