by Ed Bolian
The company was becoming established, gaining some notoriety within the Atlanta area car scene, and my customer base was increasingly loyal. Most of my business in year two was from repeat clients. I found a transaction with a repeat renter was almost three times as valuable to me than finding a new customer. They did not have a learning curve in the car, they began to think of the car as theirs, and they frequently told their friends they owned them. These factors made them rent more to continue to keep the charade up and they treated the cars better. It behooved me to discount their rentals and offer return incentives. I did that and my rental volume increased in a much needed fashion.
Literally the same week I incorporated Supercar Rentals I went on my first date with Megan. She was the girl I would end up marrying thirty-seven months and twelve days later. I grew up with Megan. We went to elementary, middle, and high school together. She is a year older than I am so while we knew of each other, we never spent a great deal of time together in school. Her mother and my mother graduated from high school together and our grandmothers were actually in a high school graduating class of twelve together. Fortunately, they did the backtracking to confirm that we were not related before we thought to do it.
I knew she had a great reputation and that she was well out of my league but like every other area of my life - I was aspirational. I remember a conversation I had with Kevin Messer four or five years before I asked Megan out of our first date. I truly cannot remember how she came up in conversation but I remember expressing some interest. His response was, “Forget about it. She has a Master-Lock between those legs.” His relationship goals and mine were very different at the time. The conversation did not continue but I remember vividly thinking that was precisely the kind of thing I would want someone to say about whatever girl would eventually become my wife.
Megan was the perfect girl both to date and to marry. Typically I had found most girls to be either one or the other. She had been in enough bad relationships to appreciate someone who was not a complete moron but she did so early enough to avoid serious issues or long term emotional scarring. She had spent some time being single and was very independent, had a career path in mind to become an elementary school teacher, and she cared enough about her family to love them and also learn from their mistakes. She was primed to be wooed.
Dating was like spontaneously giving presentations in college. Start with a couple of things you know and then just keep talking. I loved it. I loved the deep, engaging conversations where you learn more about yourself than the other person. We found our strengths and shortcomings were sufficiently opposite that we filled in each others’ gaps in an eerily providential way. Megan is a phenomenal Christian girl. She helped me to understand how to live out the ideas that I cared about and made me a much more sensitive person to what it actually took to maintain healthy relationships with people. The love God/love people dichotomy was starting to make sense, even in my stunted psychopathic emotional growth curve.
She had more friends than anyone ever. We never went anywhere that Megan didn’t see at least three or four people that she knew. I had to hone my skills of using vague pronouns to feign familiarity because I could not keep track of which ones I had met before. It is a skill that has translated well into the car business. I am truly horrible with names. There were lots of, “Hey man,” “How are you buddy?” and “Great to see you! How are things?”
I would like to think that through our relationship I have made Megan a 10% better, more effective person. Not that such a service would be fair because she has improved all aspects of me, punctuality excluded, by 1000%. I was batting out of my league but I was continuing to enjoy every minute of it.
Megan is not great at math but she knew enough to understand the rental business was nuts. I had nearly a million dollars in debt by the time I was twenty-two and while I had good answers for all of it she was purely in the relationship through faith in me rather than in the visible outcomes of what I was doing. It would have been sensational to be a fly on the wall listening to her explain to her friends and family how everything was going to be alright even though most of the time it all felt held together by the thinnest of recycled tape.
Running the exotic car rental company by myself definitely detracted and distracted me from my school work. It was a line item of priority already hanging on by a thread. I still made progress through the curriculum and was on track to graduate on time. Despite these successes I was constantly challenged by the fact that I could not make strides towards readiness to attempt a New York to Los Angeles drive and one day do so faster than anyone ever had. No matter how exciting the foreground of my life got, the background presence of the Cannonball never stopped prodding me.
The best way to describe the mental occupation the New York to Los Angeles record held in my consciousness is this. You have a toilet that is always running. It is far enough away from your bed that you can still sleep. The leak is small enough that it doesn’t impact the water bill. You have never fixed a toilet or even taken the cover off of one but you believe you can do it. You believe all you need to do is spend some time, free of everything else that so easily takes priority, and look at it. Once you do, it might take a trip to the hardware store but you will find the flapper you need to replace and you will pop it right in there.
Before you get around to that, though, you use the bathroom a hundred times, go on a few vacations, have some guests over who wonder why you don’t take care of the place, you do some math on how much the procrastination might have cost you. You gripe to some unsympathetic friends about how annoying it is and they don’t care. Your parents come to visit and they think you are not handy enough to know which end of a nail to start hitting. You even avoid that washroom altogether for a little while before you finally break down and shut the world off long enough to fix your toilet.
Chapter 5
Two Lightning bolts in the darkness
Even as it remained on the horizon I could not put my finger on why it was so compelling to me. The goal of breaking the record for driving from New York to Los Angeles is not a common one. It carries lots of risk and little reward. Based on my conversation with Yates and the history that I could research it was not clear if it was even possible. I continued to tell myself it could be done but was my hesitation actually due to a lack of means to accomplish it or the concern it was actually impossible? I had not generally allowed my life decisions to be controlled by fear, emotional risk, or limitations so I chose to believe I just was not ready. The daydreaming continued.
The cars were faster, roads were better, and the route was now shorter but there were fifty percent more people in the country and the number of cars using those roads had increased by a similar magnitude. There was no open competition so verification and validity were up to the driver. There was a real chance I would get arrested. There was probably a real chance I would die. It would certainly be extremely expensive. I knew I was unlikely to break it on the first try which would make it even more expensive. The process of attempting it could destroy a car or it could wind up requiring even more maintenance than I could anticipate adding to the expense. It was a terribly hard thing I would probably pour a lot of time and money into and end up getting nothing from. It was sounding a lot like golf. I hate golf.
The "Why?" question is one of the hardest and most enjoyable to grapple with. The itch came from all of the cultural references and to the intrinsic joy of getting out on an open road in a fast car. It was an appealing challenge to the car enthusiast, competitor, and problem solver in me. I felt the skills and talents I had lent themselves to overcoming the obstacles to success in a fairly unique combination such that being me, in spite of all of the quirks, could actually be an advantage.
It also seemed like something that might appeal to the client base that I would cater to on a daily basis in the exotic car business. If just as a publicity stunt, surely it would be salubrious to my other efforts in some way. Of course that justific
ation sounded a bit like buying season tickets to a baseball season just because you need a new hat.
The reality of it is both shallow and deep at the same time. Like Everest, a four minute mile, or a chicken across the road - you do it because it is out there. But was that enough? It is an idea that can permeate everything about you and potentially help to define who you are. I aim for Christianity and my relationship with God to be the first thing people see when they are around me but as we live in this world and pursue different things, this was one of those personal mountains and a resume item that truly mattered to me. Would anyone else care? I had no idea and I was not sure how much the public appeal mattered to me but I wanted to find out.
There was no way to know how the world might react. I had no real idea if owning Supercar Rentals would be the last job I would need. What would an employer say if they Googled me and found I was notorious for breaking laws? Would they even find out? It seemed conceivable that the whole feat could actually go unnoticed. The media climate was much less favorable to acts of public disobedience than it was in the 1970s. Would I even be able to get insurance?
I worked at the racing school a few years earlier with a great guy. He tried to teach me how to properly clean a car. That was a failure and the water spots and caked dust on my Murcielago can still attest to it. His name was Tony. Tony’s wife had sort of fallen into a gospel singing career but his greatest skill, beyond detailing a dozen racecars a day, was in storytelling.
In the early 90’s he was the caretaker of a wealthy man’s car collection. He had a nice variety of cars but he was getting ready to take delivery of his brand new Corvette ZR-1. It was an American car that, for the first time in over a decade, an Italian car guy could love. He told Tony to grab his Countach and that they would see which was faster on the way home. Tony got on the highway headed back right next to his boss in the new Corvette but it was no match for the mighty bull. Tony pulled away quickly in the Lamborghini and put some serious distance between them.
Tony crested a hill at around 180 mph and saw a cop coming in the other direction. Knowing what would happen next, he went ahead and pulled over to the side of the road. It took the cop a few minutes to get past Tony coming from the opposite direction, get turned around through the median, and pull to a stop behind Tony. The exchange went something like this:
“Do you know how fast you were going?” The officer asked Tony.
“I have a pretty good idea.”
“I was surprised that you stopped.”
“Yeah, didn’t feel like running today,” Tony defended, hoping that he might have found the good graces of the cop and get off with a warning.
“Well you can’t outrun the radio.”
“Sir I was doing about 3 miles a minute, I probably had a shot.”
“Is this your car?”
“Do you know what? It isn’t. It belongs to my boss.” Sarcasm in a time of risk and adversity. No wonder I loved this guy.
“Well what does he think of you driving it like that?”
“You can ask him in a just a minute.” Like the poetic clockwork it had the potential to be, Tony’s boss blew right past them in the Corvette at just that precise beautiful moment.
His boss came and bailed Tony of out jail. He paid a $5,000 fine to avoid forfeiting his license but it didn’t do him a lot of good because Tony could not get insurance for the next few years. Would this type of outlaw reputation bring an end or at least a temporary hiatus to my own driving career?
In May of 2007 I got a lot of those answers. At the start of the annual Bullrun cross country rally, someone bet Richard Rawlings $50,000 that he couldn’t break the Cannonball record. Like Brock Yates, Richard did not acknowledge the US Express records so he viewed the 32:51 Heinz/Yarborough time from the 1979 Cannonball as the existing mark to beat. He was already prepared to do a more than casual cross country drive in a Nero Daytona 1999 Ferrari 550 Maranello with its owner, Dennis Collins. It was outfitted with radar detectors, a dated Scorpion radar jammer, CB, traffic light changer, scanner, fuel cell, and the general checklist of ambitious road trip items.
Rawlings accepted the challenge and diverted to Manhattan to start at the Red Ball parking garage. He rolled into the Portofino in Redondo Beach 31 hours 59 minutes later, beating the 32:07 US Express record as well. He wasted no time in proclaiming the victory, having already been in negotiations for a television deal. He and Dennis did several interviews and the story got some great internet publicity. It was generally positive and persisted on message boards for quite some time. There were questions about validity but they seemed to pass. There were questions about subsequent prosecution but nothing ever seemed to materialize.
For me, sitting in my dorm room reading the internet, this was a Mars Rover landing. This was the first modern publicized attempt at the record. It was in a great car by someone who was known to be of the ability to drive fast. It got a reasonable amount of positive attention and seemed to generally lack negative consequence. This was brilliant. It seemed slow, though, a two hour eternity away from the thirty hour time I had been considering my own benchmark. Was Brock Yates correct about such a time being impossible?
There was one strangely outspoken internet voice in opposition to Rawlings’s record. The naysaying, legitimacy challenging, and belittling came from his historic Gumball rival Alex Roy. He was critical of the lack of proof, the small margin of victory over the 32:07 US Express record time, and the general attitude that Richard had about the whole thing. Alex argued that the calculation and precision he felt would be necessary to accomplish such a Herculean automotive task was not demonstrated here. Alex kind of came out of nowhere on this and his authoritative stance was somewhat strange. He was sure quick to comment though. The assumption of the audience was that the new record would challenge the salience of the US Express documentary that Alex Roy had invested in and was working on alongside Cory Welles.
Roy’s indignance made a lot more sense just a few short months later in October of 2007. He released his new book, “The Driver.” He revealed how on Columbus Day weekend of 2006 he and co-driver Dave Maher had driven his 2000 BMW M5 from the New York Classic Car Club to the Santa Monica Pier in 31 hours 4 minutes. Cory Welles rode in the back seat and captured video. Alex had waited a year to complete his book and to allow the statute of limitations to expire on some of the speeding laws. He had bested the Rawlings/Collins time and done it before their drive actually took place. To this day, neither believes the other actually did it. At least that is what each claims to me. Neither have published any wholistically conclusive proof they did it but the documentation that was publicly available and the perceived media fact checking made it much harder to doubt anything about the Roy/Maher claim.
Alex claims to have a cornucopia of video, photos, toll receipts, gas receipts, witness accounts, etc. Richard claims to have some video and a phone log with his wife. I hate the idea that anyone would lie about this type of thing and I find it emotionally useless to question either. Both had been repeatedly claimed online and there was nothing to be gained by claiming a “record” that was slower than either.
The game had clearly changed. I was no longer tip toeing towards this record in the dark. There were two formidable competitors who had staked their claims. One could more easily dismiss Rawlings’s success as good fortune based on the spontaneity of it but Roy had made this his life’s mission. He was scientific, calculated, and prepared. Was I capable of that level of preparation? Would I ever be able to afford it? Could I chase a goal as intently if I truly doubted I had what it took to compete on that level? I wanted to find out but I didn’t know how. I also had the black hole of the rental business consuming any excess money I had in the name of fleet expansion.
Kevin, Chris, and I had frequent conversations about it. Megan knew that it loomed in my head and that one day I would probably do it but she never seemed to give the talks much credence. We set out to define the key variables in the equ
ation.
The Car - We needed something very fast. It should could carry three people, lots of gas, have a suspension to handle the weight and performance, and get reasonable fuel economy. It also needed to be comfortable. It needed to be capable but also stealthy and able to fly under the proverbial and literal radar. If it became newsworthy it would be nice to use something interesting. Obviously an M5 was out.
The Route - I needed to find a balance between the shortest route and the fastest route based on a highway preference. I would also need the equipment necessary to maintain the course. It was more than generally New York to Los Angeles. Alex had driven from the New York Classic Car Club to the Santa Monica Pier. Richard adhered to the most common Cannonball end points - the Red Ball Parking Garage and the Portofino Inn. I loved the idea of this starting with Yates and the later was an easy decision. The question of obstacles also presented - traffic, weather, accidents, construction. Avoidance of these possible hindrances would also be critical.
The Prep - We would need a lot of anti-cop gadgets to avoid detection. I had some of these from the 04 AKA Rally but this trip was on a whole new level. Alex’s M5 looked like a space station inside. The installation would need to be clean and purposeful. Ergonomics and access to the necessary data were top priorities.
The Team - This did not seem like something that I could fully plan and execute myself. I needed a real partner who could share the driving, the emotional load, and the finances of it. While Kevin and Chris both loved the discussion it remained questionable as to whether or not they would end up being willing to come along or contribute financially to the endeavor.