by Ed Bolian
We also talked about how it read from his perspective. It is rare that people who pursue this as a dream are listed in the same breath as their co-driver. Dan Gurney came in at the last minute to co-drive with Yates. In all other attempts Yates struggled to find people he considered acceptable co-drivers or passengers that were willing to take part. Diem & Turner were the most compatible team that I recall reading about. Alex Roy and Richard Rawlings are the most outspoken of their teams and more responsible for the planning than their counterparts so they have basked in most of whatever glory can be gained from this type of endeavor. In Roy’s case, that is in spite of the fact that his co-driver, Dave Maher, maintained cruising averages that were 10-20 mph faster than his own. Dennis Collins was the money behind their drive but received far less attention.
I did not use that understanding to pursue a particular co-driver but it was some consolation as those who had more of a hand in planning (and deserving of the associated praise) proved unavailable. There is an inescapable level of narcissism that comes with trying to break any world record and it appears this one in particular caters more to an individual rather than a team. My interest in the pursuit was not primarily attention seeking but I don’t wish to pretend it wasn’t a factor.
For Doug, and the same would have been true for me if the roles had been reversed, this was something that he wanted to do himself. It had not occupied his consciousness for the greater part of a decade prior but it was a chapter of Automotive Americana that he loved and wanted to associate himself with one day. While I cannot imagine being able to say “no” to this trip on any level, this would have been the only grounds where I could consider it. I give Doug a lot of credit for being able to say no to an arrive and drive program. Not sure I could have done that.
Doug still wants to try it. I don’t think he would mind not breaking the record but he finds the history similarly compelling to the way I look at it. He believes that there are still secrets out there that will unlock minutes and maybe hours from the existing times. He wants to do it on his terms, using his strategy, and for his own reasons. It would be hard for me personally to find a greater reason to respect someone.
I started going through my contacts trying to find anyone I felt was a competent enough driver to co-pilot and someone else whose presence was tolerable enough to ride in the back seat, much less be useful. This was presenting an unexpected barrier to my plans I had not anticipated. If you ask anyone close to me, they all knew at some point an attempt was going to happen. I cannot imagine that the odds cast for my success were ever very high. It had made for some interesting dinner conversations over the years. Most people had very positive perceptions of the idea in theory. I am sure they thought the execution would eventually fail in some interesting way.
People had always been quick to say they would be happy to go with me on the trip. They still are to this day. When faced with driving 130-150 mph for more than a day with no real protection from jail or incident, they find something else they have to do that weekend. It may be pawned off on work, family, scheduling, an emergency annual physical, or a difficult to reschedule haircut but it is really just fear. This is an unknowable experience until you are in it and most of the people around me were simply smart enough to realize that this is fundamentally just a bad idea.
I was coming to terms with the idea that the people in the car with me were probably not going to be the group of people who had planned and contemplated this idea with me for all of these years. I realized they probably would not be fully aware of all of the risks involved. That posed a few risks in itself. They could back out at any time and they might not react as I would hope in a worst case scenario. That meant it was time for another call to the naive insurance man. $2 million general liability umbrella - check!
Over the years Kevin, Chris, Forrest and I had spent a lot of time talking about ruses, disguises, and ploys that might be useful in the trip. Getting pulled over in a car outfitted like this was going to raise a few questions and it seemed responsible to have some answers. Rawlings did not have much in that regard but Alex had put some serious time and planning into it.
He had outfitted the car with a few extra things to create the appearance of being a storm chaser. He found that the list of required gadgets for barreling into the center of a tornado is eerily similar to what you might pack to go out and try to break a cross country outlaw record. He had stickers and shirts made along with special labels for all of his equipment with weather related names. Alex Roy is the Brick Tamland of outlaw cross country street racers.
Of course the holy grail of Cannonball ruses was the fake ambulance employed by the team of Brock Yates and Hal Needham in 1979. This was not practical based on the direction that we were headed in automobile selection. When my preparation had heated up in 2008, I had phoned up a local pig slaughterhouse and procured two now-frozen pig hearts. I did some light graphics design work and came up with a sweet TransCon TransPlant TransPort Logo and was going to fab up some paperwork explaining why this transplant heart had to be moved by car. Threat of cyst eruption seemed appropriate.
We had talked about smoke screens, blinding LED rear facing lights, and lots of other stuff. One Gumball participant used to evade police by throwing grocery bags filled with five hundred one dollar bills out of the top of his Ferrari F50. People would stop their cars and try to grab the money, congesting the roads for pursuit. Less highway than surface street practicality but interesting nonetheless.
I had looked at color transforming options. The image of the construction workers rinsing the temporary white paint off of the Countach in Cannonball Run II was clearly running through my brain. I thought of a few possibilities. One was to change the color of half of the car with a line diagonally from the front right corner to the back left. That way the car would appear to be a different color when seen from the front than from the back. Another was to use low adhesive or static cling vinyl in black that could be removed on the side of the road to reveal the stock paint color. The Plasti-Dip sprayable vinyl products were also coming onto the scene and those were worth exploring. Ultimately I ended up not using any of those ideas due to cost and timing but they were a lot of fun to contemplate.
Around the same time as my interest in the Cannonball was piqued, I learned a fact in a social studies class that was fairly interesting. I was as an 18 year old sitting in an Advanced Placement American Government Class. My teacher was breezing through the US Constitution as it pertained the Article that governed treatment and privileges of senators and congressmen. It said in Article 1 Section 6 that:
“The Senators and Representatives shall receive a compensation for their services, to be ascertained by law, and paid out of the treasury of the United States. They shall in all cases, except treason, felony and breach of the peace, be privileged from arrest during their attendance at the session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any speech or debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other place.”
Privileged from arrest? That sounded amazing. Knowing how hard diplomatic plates and privileges were to get, this seemed within the realm of feasibility. If I could get elected to state or federal Congressional seat and find a reason to be in Los Angeles, theoretically I would not face any consequences for speeding if pulled over. That hinged on the cop knowing the US Constitution and on them not finding some way to raise the stakes into felony endangerment or evasion. Fun as it might be, that idea got scratched.
Years earlier I had a friend with government connections in Nigeria get me a Nigerian Driver’s License with an accompanying International Driving Permit. I figured that if I had to surrender it the penalties might be less severe and the documentation might not make its way back to Georgia. The friends of mine that continued on to law school helped to enlighten me as to what a bad idea using it was.
Police impersonation is a popular ruse in discussion. Like attention/performance enhancing drugs I c
onsidered guising the car as a cop car to be outside of the spirit of the exercise. There had not been any fake police vehicles in Cannonball or US Express and it felt like a direction that I did not want to go in. Alex had dressed the M5 up in various law enforcement liveries for Gumball and other events but he too decided against using even the strobe lights on his drive.
With a team that was unlikely to hold up a transplant ruse and a budget already tapped, it was time to proceed with the novel plan of simply not getting caught. Alex had spent a lot of time pouring over the laws and penalties of speeding in each jurisdiction that the route takes you through. I knew that speeding was frowned upon and I knew that you could end up going to jail for it. That being said, the reality of getting caught going 150 and 110 is generally the same so there was not much else to think about. Without a recon run to go from, my plan was to drive as fast I could everywhere and see where it got me. I had the equipment to make it as safe from the consequence of arrest as I felt I could.
Most of the people who knew enough about the record to understand the difficulty, myself included, doubted the possibility of breaking it on the first attempt. I am sure many of them were eagerly anticipating the opportunity to go next time and to profit from the lessons learned in the first failure. I know it was Tom Park’s excuse. I certainly cannot blame him. Earlier that year when my schedule had gotten too full I had thought of trying to get someone else to do the first recon run to test out the car and tell me how things were working. Clearly that would never have worked.
Forrest and the Bacon Blocker were a package deal due to control functionality. He was close to having it ready but it was not ready for use in 2013. It became pseudo-operational about 4 weeks after we got back from the trip, complete with “Mercedes Benz Active Cruise Control and Accident Avoidance System PROTOTYPE” screen printed on the control board. To our knowledge it is the most advanced active radar jammer for police radar frequencies in civilian existence today.
Alex Roy had broken the record on Columbus Day which was the traditional date for the US Express in the early 1980’s. That happened to fall on my birthday in 2013 and it was unclear if the car would be ready by then. Also, spending my 28th birthday in jail sounded bad. I did not want to attempt it on the last weekend of the month due to the increased patrolling of highways as different quotas were trying to be met.
The 19-21st became the target date. The dates are always a three day window due to the time change and the fact that you do not want to arrive in LA at any time other than the middle of the night.
I would leave Manhattan at 10 PM and hope to arrive in Redondo Beach by 1 AM local time for a 30 hour elapsed time. This gave me a nice margin of failure that still constituted success. I needed to get there before 2:04 AM to break the record. I prayed it would not be a close call in either direction. If I only beat it by a couple of minutes I had to assume that it would cause quite a fight over accuracy of measurement. I knew I could win such an argument but I hoped to avoid it. Disputes and accusations of dishonesty feel like they cheapen the pursuit. If I was a few minutes slower but stuck to the actual route I would feel like I deserved to claim the record even with a longer time. The car was finished in service and CarTunes was doing some last minute tinkering with the CB and Scanner.
I called Alex a few weeks before we left. I knew that in order to avoid some of the statutes of limitation, Alex had waited a year to come forward and claim the record. I assumed that if someone else had broken the record recently they would have called him even if they were not going to claim it publicly. He said that he was not aware of anyone else trying to break the record at the time. I told him I was planning on trying it soon and he cautioned me about running out of weekends. It was unseasonably warm in New York but that was bound to change at any time.
He did bring up an interesting point, someone had recently done me the favor of testing the national response to publicly breaking traffic laws. Adam Tang, going by the name AfroDuck, had recently broken a record that Alex had held several years prior - the lap around Manhattan.
It did not go well. It may have been twelve years since 9/11 but the appetite for demonstrating an ability to beat a government system in New York City without being contained by the existing defense protocols was not the black eye that NYPD wanted. The public outcry had been intense and law enforcement had gone to some unbelievably extreme lengths to find him and arrest him. This was somewhat different with no real positive historical precedent to cling to or any redemptive social value in that drive. Pot Kettle issues understood.
At least there was no image of two beautiful girls stepping out of a Countach wearing spandex racing suits spraypainting across a sign in Manhattan saying No Right on Red. Then who could resist proving the system wrong? That Cannonball Countach image was as forever emblazoned in my memory as it was for the recipient of my next phone call.
It was Wednesday, October 16, 2013.
I got into work and decided it was time. I called Laid Back Dave Black. I reminded him of our conversation a few weeks prior, an area in which his memory required precious little jostling. It was clear he thought I was about to ask him to fly to New York, rent a car, and lead us out Manhattan. He was backpedaling on his original offer as his mental personal accounting arithmetic started kicking in. Dave was still unemployed and working on some web development projects. It was hard enough to rationalize his monthly Lamborghini payment, much less spending $1,000 on an up and back trip to aid and abet.
“I want you to be my co-driver.” I told him.
“[expletive] yes. I am in.” He responded as a reflex. a few seconds later his brain began to process the request.
I told him to meet me the next evening at my house so we could pack up some things and plan for the trip. We were leaving Friday morning.
As soon as he hung up the phone I got a text message. “I should probably ask Lisa.”
There goes the neighborhood. Fortunately, Dave knew nothing about the record other than Burt Reynolds and 32 Hours 7 Minutes. Lisa, his wife, knew even less. Neither had read Alex’s book, they didn’t know about Rawlings, and had never heard of Brock Yates.
Dave was a good driver. He could hang with me in the mountains and we had done some Lamborghini track events together. He is extremely intelligent but he over-thinks most things. Having worked for Apple, he was extremely tech savvy and he processes information very quickly. Despite theoretical criteria and outward appearances, he was a great candidate to be a co-driver.
I had spent my day off earlier that week shopping for supplies, packing my toothbrush, and going through the systems on the car for functionality. I went to Bass Pro Shops to buy two pairs of the best [returnable] binoculars that they had and made sure to keep the receipt.
Their sales guy asked me, “How can I help you?”
“I am looking for a couple sets of binoculars for a trip.”
“Oh yeah, where are you headed?” He asked.
I answered. “Kind of all over the place. I need to spots bears. Probably from 1,000-1,500 yards. And out of a moving vehicle.”
“That is pretty tough without stabilization. We don’t sell those.” He was not optimistic. He indicated that two of the designs were good. I told him I would try them both out and see how they worked. I checked the lunar phase for the coming weekend and it was going to be a nearly full moon which meant nighttime visibility should be excellent.
I am 6’5”. Dave is 6’2”. That meant that there was no relief for anyone sitting behind either of us. On the Thursday before we left I was getting desperate, calling people I had not spoken to in years and asking them to ride with me. I was close to getting Megan to go but I was still sane enough to know that was a bad idea. My younger brother was a short flight away but I Saving-Private-Ryan-ed him out of consideration before our parents would have done the same.
I thought of Dan Huang. He was small, smart, and liked cars. I didn’t even have his cell phone number though. I sent him a message through Face
book. “Do you have any plans this weekend? Give me a call.” I left him my phone number.
He called a couple of hours later. The conversation was brief. He agreed to go. It was a quick enough response that I was not sure he understood what we were doing. I felt the need to clarify the nature of the request but the salesman in me knew well enough to stop while I was ahead.
Dan is a couple of years younger than I am, properly sized for back seat CL riding, Chinese, extremely tech competent, and easy to get along with. Come to find out he was also very good at keeping up calm outward appearances when he was pretty freaked out on the inside. Dan had bounced around from startup to startup since exiting Georgia Tech and offered the advantage of looking at the world in a very similar manner to Dave and I. Our relocated spare tire which now rested behind the driver’s seat would be in good company.
The pursuance of this record was a very entrepreneurial exercise. It had every element of a startup business just without the eventual potential for profitability. I get asked this often and I know that Alex has as well - How do you make money from holding the record?
You don’t. Richard has done well with the renewal and continuation of Fast & Loud but that is due to his personality and the marketing of the Discovery Channel. The tattoo on his arm reading 31:59 has helped with the backstory but it is not the real reason for his success.
I had to define our goal/market, figure out what capital expenses were required, manage costs, solve problems, manage negative outcomes, build a useful team, and execute. The business planning of Great White Reptiles, Supercar Rentals, and building the Lamborghini owner database had served me well. Whatever formula for success could exist, I felt like we had it.