by Ed Bolian
The victorious car becomes the trophy so I spent a lot of time thinking about what I wanted it to look like on the other end of this whole experience, maintaining at least some semblance of optimism. On one hand you want to have a clean install without wires running everywhere and all of the devices tucked into a nice, neat place. On the other you want something that can portray the grit of the road and the bootstrapping spirit of a decade long passion project. The car was the vessel to complete the task but also served to tell the story. I hoped it would be a time capsule of a true high point in my life.
If everything went well, fifty years from then when my grandkids were reading this, the garage where I kept the car would be the next stop. It needed to be something to behold. The dated navigation equipment, the antennas, the fuel tanks, it was all going to give them a glimpse into what those couple of days in October felt like.
Sales at the dealership were not letting up. I sold 50% more cars in 2013 than I had in 2012. It kept me so busy I questioned whether or not I would have time to do this. Taylor Clark, the Supercar Rentals accountant and voice of road trip reason, got a new job and was unable to take time off to serve as the support passenger and reality check in the car. Gumball Chris was out with work and girlfriend problems, Adam’s growing baby still kept him out. Forrest had been called up to the A team upon mini-Adam’s conception but he was working insane hours at a research lab and he was not sure if he would be able to take the time off. Without him, the Bacon Blocker was a no-go. Any functionality he could achieve would not be usable by anyone else who was unfamiliar with the inner-workings. I kept pushing forward but the outcome was even more of an unknown.
Money was still tight despite my successes in selling cars. I needed a few more devices and countermeasures. I was looking for something to sell. I found just the thing - my $50,000 Lamborghini engine block coffee table.
In January of 2007 I was eating dinner with a fellow student from Tech. I remember the seat I was sitting in at one of my favorite Mongolian restaurants. We were discussing whether or not these new smartphones were going to catch on. I got a call from a friend in south Florida saying, “I saw your Gallardo on a flatbed heading down I-95. It looked like it was in pretty rough shape.” As the Atlanta rental market had quieted for the winter, I rented the car to a guy in Palm Beach that was promoting an exotic car show. I tried to call the rental customer. He did not answer.
My heart sank. The next morning I began calling around to the exotic car shops in South Florida that were likely destinations for a broken Lamborghini. I found the car at Lamborghini Miami. The diagnosis was “catastrophic engine damage.” The car had thrown one and a half connecting rods, most of a piston, and a rod bearing out both sides of the engine block. Their preliminary parts estimate was $56,000.
This was an unfathomable blow to a young student entrepreneur. The business had been doing well but this was going to be a huge hole to climb my way out of. The customer was someone whom I had known for years and who knew better than to mistreat a car like that. He had been paying me by the mile for his use of the car but in this most recent billing window had driven the car nearly 3,000 miles including some very abusive low speed maneuvers. This had run the car low on oil and the sustained high RPMs had popped the motor.
I ended up finding an engine in Europe that had been taken out of another early Gallardo which had been involved in a front end collision. It was $15,000 and I had it shipped to the dealer in Miami for install. A new clutch, seals, and labor was another $15k or so. A month or so later I got the car home and began the lawsuit against the customer. It never yielded anything beyond continued headache, heartache, and the legal bills.
I ended up with a very cool looking blown Gallardo engine. I bought a heavy duty dolly from the local hardware shop and a big piece of plate glass to put on top of it. It became the centerpiece in the customer waiting area where I stored the cars. It also served as a good warning to customers not to abuse the cars.
I had actually sold the engine a couple of years before that point to a company engineering turbo systems for Gallardos. They had stripped it down, used the heads for a project and they were left with a very clean aluminum engine block. That was only of scrap value for them so I asked if they would ship it back to me. They did. It was a great momento to the rental company that was now a few years in the rearview mirror but the Cannonball goal was close and I needed the cash. I sold the decorative engine block for $3,000 and placed the order for the few remaining supplies.
The list of items installed in the car ended up being:
●Valentine 1 Radar/Laser Detector x 2
●Passport/Escort Radar/Laser Detector & Diffuser
●Laser Interceptor Laser Diffuser/Jammer
●2 x Garmin GPS Units with XM Traffic
●3 x iPhone Cradles with Chargers
●iPad Cradle and Charger
●GeoForce Satellite Tracking Device
●Uniden Police Scanner with GPS & Radio Antenna
●Cobra 29 CB Radio with K40 Antenna
●Toll passes for the pertinent areas
●2 x 22 Gallon Auxiliary Fuel Cells with Transfer Pumps
●Custom Switch Panel with kill switch for rear lights, fuel pump control, manage power to all devices, Passport & Laser Interceptor Controls
●Power Inverter with Outlets in Center Console
●MiRT - traffic light changer
●Full Size Spare
●Fire Extinguisher
●Full Size Hydraulic Jack
●2 pairs of binoculars - 8x and 10x
●3 digital timers
●Cooler
The fuel system was finished. Servicing the car was the final step remaining to be ready to press the GO button. The trip was going to impose more stress on the car than I could anticipate. I also knew that Alex Roy’s most promising attempt got derailed by a clogged fuel filter and pump assembly in Oklahoma. His M5 was six years old at the time of his run. My CL55 was nine years old with nearly twice the miles. I wanted to make sure the car got an exhaustive tech inspection and a redundantly clean bill of health before departure.
One of the reasons for choosing the Mercedes was the abundance of independent service options. I assumed I would find a shop that thought the idea was interesting and they would bend over backwards to get the business. I was wrong. Many were scared. I was vague about the purpose of the car. It was pretty much just a request to replace every fluid, filter, consumable item, and to address the suspension issues. The best service offer and quote actually came from one of our local authorized dealers - RBM North in Alpharetta, GA.
We had just hired one of their best sales guys to come and work with us at Motorcars of Georgia. It is not uncommon for new hires at the dealership to do something extravagant to celebrate their new job. The broken record cliche is buying a motorcycle. The first week that Nick was at our store he took delivery of a new Victory Motorcycle. In Georgia, you have to take a class to get a motorcycle license. You must provide your own motorcycle to take the test to get your license. You have to have a motorcycle license to buy motorcycle insurance. You do not have to show proof of insurance to buy and take delivery of a bike. You may be noticing a sequencing issue here. He was planning on taking the responsible steps to ownership such as buying a helmet, taking the class, and getting insurance within the coming months.
One of our other employees was going to move the newly delivered bike into our shop for safe keeping. Nick, the new guy, asked to sit on his bike for a moment. He then grew bold and decided he would try to see if he could make it move. He did and managed to hold on for about thirty feet straight into the back of a Porsche Panamera. He shattered the rear hatch glass with his un-helmeted face.
I was on the phone trying to buy a Bugatti for a customer when I heard the crash. I went outside to find blood pouring out of Nick’s face. It was a scene that would make an axe murderer queasy. The rest of our team at Motorcars of Georgia seemed
fairly perplexed by the whole thing so I took charge of getting our new man some proper medical attention. They were scrambling to pick the bike up, ascertain the extent of the damage to both Porsche and Nick, and generally freaking out. I walked out, grabbed Nick by his shoulders, smiled, and said “We are in for a long night!”
I loaded Nick into Megan’s Cayenne, which was at the dealership for some reason. Fortunately, it had some large moving quilts inside that I used to cover the leather seats from the unspeakable amount of blood all over him. I took him to the emergency room and watched the A, B, and C teams participate in stitching his face up. It was at least eighty facial stitches. At one point, the doctor pulled back a loose flap of skin and an ant walked out of Nick’s face. I told him that whatever stories we got from today, they would never hold a candle to what that ant got to tell the next grasshopper he ran into. “I was minding my own business, hanging out on this bulbous Porsche station wagon thing when all of a sudden...”
He had not been working at the dealership long enough to have health insurance so before we left the ER I did some negotiating with the financial counselor. We got his $8k bill down to $800 or so. I took him to a pharmacy to get his prescriptions filled and got him home. The experience made me look like a great friend and earned me some favors. I cashed a few in on help negotiating this service with his former employer. Strange way to earn a discounted labor rate but I do enjoy the story.
I dropped the car off at RBM North Mercedes-Benz in Alpharetta. My instructions were fairly simple. The service advisor Nick had referred me to was aware of what I was doing but the techs were not initially. Fix or replace everything that needs it or might need it and then look the car over so I can drive it without worrying. The latter was the issue. The 115k mile CL55 was not without needs in the service department.
They replaced the tires, brakes, fluids, and filters like I asked but it also required spark plugs and wires, two shocks, some other suspension components, motor mounts, a new battery, something called a flex disk, we agreed to do all bulbs, etc. for a retail total of over $17k and a discounted price to me of $8,800. The technicians and the shop foreman were very intrigued by the project but they looked at me like I was crazy when I proposed it. The car was barely worth the price of the service bill and it was obviously not the type of request they expected to encounter in their careers of servicing daily use cars for businessmen and their overly entitled wives.
Even though I had been hoping for something closer to half that, it was a good deal. That being said, I was still short from being able to pay for it. A few months prior I had come across a young guy whose father owned a coffee growing operation in South America. He was using his entrepreneurial chops to expand the business into a bottled, ready to serve, iced coffee beverage. The company is called Blue Donkey Iced Coffee. He felt like the car guy market was great for his product and he asked me if I might be interested in some marketing assistance for one of my events. He came along on a mountain drive and we talked about a few other ideas. When I mentioned that I was trying to break this record he thought it was terrific. Driving for a long time with caffeine needs equalled his product in his mind. It came pre-mixed with milk but I wasn’t going to argue. He came through with the last $2,500 that I needed to finish paying off my AMEX bill after the Mercedes service.
There were a lot of other modifications I had explored doing to the car prior to the drive. The goal was obviously to make the car faster but also to improve the fuel economy. A popular package of modifications for that type of supercharged AMG engine was a combination of a smaller pulley for the supercharger, headers, exhaust, higher flowing air filters, and an ECU tune.
The first few of those would have been helpful to me but the ECU tunes that were available were not designed for this type of drive. They were mapped out to change the air fuel ratios to make the car accelerate faster from zero to sixty and improve the quarter mile time. I spoke with the three major Mercedes Benz modification houses - RennTech, Kleeman, and Carlsson. I filled them in on my objectives and all agreed that it was theoretically possible but they were not sure when they would be able to deliver it. When I had felt I needed to get closer to 15 mpg this was necessary. Based on the amount of fuel I was planning to carry at that point, this seemed unnecessary. It was added to the pile of ideas to be used if we ended up making our first run in 32-35 hours and needed ways to improve upon the time significantly.
I also decided to keep the car as stock as possible for the purpose of reliability. While it is popular to modify and personalize a car to suit the needs or wants of each user, the mechanical aspects of the car were best left to the original engineers at Mercedes in my opinion. It was easy to make a car go faster for a short time but building an engine that was still capable of doing this drive seemed best left up to Marco Weissgerber when he signed the hand assembled AMG engine in the first place.
Throughout that summer the sheer enormity of the project had started to set in. It was finally happening and this was truly the most dangerous thing that I had ever done. That was a new and very strange realization. I could tell that my brain was telling my inescapable desire to do this that it was really a pretty bad idea. It felt sort of like smoking with a label that says it will kill you, or buying a pet tiger, or dating a woman who cheated on someone else with you. You know the odds say the situation will not end well but you see how cool, fun, and sexy it can be as rational calculation just flies out the window at 150 mph.
I bought a $2 million life insurance policy. It seemed like a good idea given the developments in planning and the imminence of the first attempt. It also may be the only thing I ever did that made my father-in-law proud. We did not have any unhealthy amount of debt at the time but it still felt like a good bet.
REMARKS
From David "Klink" Kalinkiewicz, Former Master Technician at Mercedes Benz of Alpharetta
I really did not know what to make of this guy.
I first met Ed Bolian in late 2012. I was then serving as a general "go to guy" in the service department at a Mercedes Benz dealer in metro Atlanta. I was told that he had recently purchased a 2004 Mercedes-Benz CL55 AMG and that he had a question or two about it.
I was predisposed to dislike him. I was told that he was “some kind of sales guy at the Lamborghini dealer." Yes, I realize that my mental imagery was out of date, possibly by decades, but perhaps you'll forgive me if I admit that I was expecting to see verdant waves of chest hair circled by loops of gold chain, and a huge ring on one hand counterbalanced on the other by an oversized watch so encrusted in diamonds that the hands could not be viewed without polarized sunglasses. I was kind of hoping that his inevitably white shoes would be marred by our usually, and in that moment unfortunately, immaculate shop floor.
The Ed Bolian that I was introduced to was not that guy. The guy I met had probably never even seen a prostitute, much less aspirated the cocaine off the thigh of a very expensive one with a Giorgio Moroder soundtrack pounding in the background. Maybe this was only the gofer that the “Lambo person” sent to drop off an MB trade-in, that for some reason they weren't simply auctioning off? This fellow was remarkably unremarkable; Mr. Rogers, not Mr. T. He could have been a Sunday school teacher.
He certainly did not seem like the kind of guy that could be making a living by fogging dodgy six-figure lease arrangements and balloon notes past gullible finance company agents before an inevitable appearance in the collateral confrontation scene on an episode of "Airplane Repo."
The man I met was calm, polite, thoughtful and articulate, with knowledge of automobiles that went to a much greater depth than my unfair biases had predicted, or that his obvious youth made likely. I was starting to like this guy, but then again, my pre-meeting prejudices had set such a low bar.
At least he had good taste in cars. The one he had chosen to spend his own money on was everything that high-line cars attempt to be but often aren’t: responsive, fast, stable, comfortable, durable, even reliable if main
tained, and with a restrained industrial design aesthetic that emphasized form over contrivance. Like many of the big Mercedes-Benz coupes from the ‘60s to the present, this car has a look that is now lost on a generation raised on Ritalin, particularly so in its rainy day blue/gray hue - Granite Gray.
Ed told me that he had experience with Mercedes-Benz cars, and the rest of our conversation bore this out. He expressed his desire to keep this car for some period of time.
I had no idea what mission this car was being prepared for. I also never would have guessed that this much younger gentleman would become a personal hero of mine in just a few months.
In March 2013, Ed brought his MB to our shop for a few repairs and a routine maintenance service. I was happy to see that his “new old car” appeared to be working out for him and that possibly through, or maybe only in spite of our conversations, we had earned a chance at some business his employer was more than capable of providing. We performed an “A” service and generally looked the car over.
Well, we must have done well enough on that visit, because in early October 2013, Ed again brought his CL55 to us, this time for a strangely comprehensive preventive maintenance…
Ed’s instructions were to change every fluid, filter, and consumable maintenance item. He asked us to carefully inspect the suspension in particular, and to address anything else that we saw. This was a change of pace in this new age of all show/no dough customers. It is not uncommon to get carte blanche to make a newer S65 perfect again after some unfortunate accident, or to bring great-grandad’s 1964 230SL back to road worthiness, but this was a somewhat alien request for a high mile CL55, a car that by this point was usually in the loose and uncaring grip of its insolvent third owner.