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

by Ed Bolian

  I made a last grocery run before the trip. I bought water, Red Bull, Gatorade, Nutrition Bars, Dried Fruits, Candy Bars, chewable vitamins (C, Multi, Zinc, B12), facial cleaning cloths, hand sanitizer, paper products, urinal bottles, bedpans, wire ties, every kind of tape, flashlights, etc.

  Finally I had our driving team. On Thursday night we all met at my house. Dave and Dan showed up. Adam came as well. This was the first time that they had all seen the car in its finished state and each other. I would have loved to fully understand what was going through their heads at that point. They were both clearly nervous and the mood was one of intense confusion.

  I have to assume that they were expecting a fairly casual road trip. It was a reasonable deduction based on the way that I had solicited their assistance. How would someone be taking this seriously and need to ask two people completely unrelated to the project to come on at the last possible moment?

  Adam had come over to see everyone. Adam is every inch of 6’10”. When Dave showed up next, he looked at Adam and assumed he was our third. The piling on concern was simultaneously amusing and telling. He was clearly on edge. Adam was growing less and less regretful on the opportunity that he was forgoing.

  Dan pulled up. Dave sighed in relief. Adam hadn’t looked like a Huang. “You must be Dan?” Dave said.

  “Yeah, Dave?” Dan asked to confirm.

  “Yes. I offered. This is Adam. He will be using the tracking device to monitor progress and check on weather.” Introductions with suspense are better.

  The car changed the conversation from casual to intense. My orange LP640 had never been more overlooked since it had left the factory in Sant A’gata. When they looked inside the CL and saw all of the equipment that had been installed and came to appreciate the investment that I had made in the idea, it started to become more serious. The holes in the dash, gas tanks in the trunk, wires run everywhere, and toilet facilities on board - it was clear I meant business.

  Chapter 14

  You're Leaking Gas

  Some of the logistics remained open ended. The departure time posed a bit of an issue. Dave and Dan were not of a mindset or position to argue with anything I was proposing. I had decided the best time to leave was between 9 and 11 PM on a Saturday night. That meant we would get through the Midwest before people started waking up to go to church on Sunday. Sunday was inevitably going to be the lowest traffic day so we wanted to maximize the Sunday driving.

  Leaving Manhattan at 10 PM after getting some real rest the day of departure was tough. I had planned to drive from Atlanta to Washington, DC on Friday, stay the night, go into New York City by noon on Saturday and then get a hotel to get about five hours of sleep before heading over to the Red Ball.

  That was easier said than done. Check out was at 11 everywhere in Manhattan and check in was no earlier than 4. I would have to get the room for the night before and the night after, availability was low and cost was prohibitively high.

  Ash Majid was a friend of mine who had recently moved from Atlanta to Manhattan and his apartment happened to be directly across from the parking garage where we were starting. I sent him the first few turns as we were planning the route out of the city and he responded, “I think that might actually be right across the street from me.”

  He had agreed to see us off on Saturday night and gave us some advice on where to stay. The Manhattan hotels all had parking available but it was all underground valet lots that felt risky. It was impossible to remove all of the equipment from the car and a theft of any of it, albeit unlikely, was not an acceptable risk to take. Replacement was possible. Getting there again to try after re-purchase and re-installation was not. Ash told us to look at staying in Jersey City. It would be cheaper, easier, and the parking availability was much better.

  Dave, Dan, and I had a discussion where they pretty much just nodded their heads and blankly stared in shock and fear at what they weren’t sure they had gotten themselves into. We decided the best logistical arrangement was to make the entire drive up the first day and to get into Jersey City late Friday night or early on Saturday morning. That way we could sleep until noon or so and then go do some recon work on the best exit path out of the city. We agreed to forgo the stop in DC and make the entire drive up into New Jersey on Friday. The plan was to reconvene at my house around 9 AM on Friday morning to head out after morning rush hour traffic died down in Atlanta.

  I did not sleep much Thursday night and I doubt the other guys did either. Lamborghini had scheduled a dealer meeting at Fontana Speedway in California for the coming weekend so Brandon, our GM, went instead of me. Everyone asked where I was and they were quite excited to hear what the better offer had been. The idea of Cannonball never fails to elicit a pretty strong emotional response from a group of car guys. The huge appeal of this goal to the people I hang around every day was a great thing. You cannot love cars and not love Cannonball. Long distance exotic car road trips rest near the top of most petrolhead bucket lists. The highest rated Top Gear episodes were always their epic road trips.

  The staff of Top Gear Magazine actually made a Cannonball attempt around 2006. They took 2 Jaguars on a trip from New York to Los Angeles but stopped at night to rest, stopping the clock as they did. They were arrested near the Eastern California border for speeding although their average moving speeds were no better than those of the top Cannonball and US Express times. The reader comments were critical of their half-hearted stopping strategy and they quickly took the article down from their web site.

  As I continued to examine and evaluate my own motivation for doing this, the targeted marketing aspect of the reveal was always a major pro. I have never been any good at separating work from my personal life. Each defines the other. That has been easy because every job I have held revolved around a personal interest. I never needed to stop working and start playing because the demarcation was never clear. The working was a bit less fulfilling and the playing was a lot more expensive but to an outside observer I would imagine it is a tough distinction to make.

  Most of the people at the dealership were not privy to what I was doing. Most of my friends were not aware of what I was doing. In fact, pretty much my immediate family, a couple people from work who I needed to clear the time off with, and the growing list of active confederates it took to pull it off were the only ones who knew what was going on that weekend.

  I felt like keeping the circle close to the chest was important. It only took one person who knew someone that knew a cop along the route that could get wind of one of the biggest catches of his life coming through town to really throw a wrench into the plan. It also felt emotionally safer for me to have a smaller group of people to explain this all to in the event I failed on this attempt.

  I knew I was more prepared to do this than anyone ever had been. We had the unbelievable benefit of having two teams publicly break the record in the previous decade. I had read and re-read Alex’s book, Brock Yates’s book, and all of the stories about Rawlings’s trip. The car was ready, running well, and it looked like the uncontrollable variables were under control. As long as we didn’t hit any major traffic we had a chance. I estimated our chances of breaking the record at 30% and our chances of finishing around 70%. I felt that those were higher than anyone had ever had since Yates did the recon run in May of 1971.

  Assuming you are a capable driver and you have a sufficiently prepared car to reliably carry you across the country, most of it is out of your hands after you get to New York. I have used the metaphor of a Hot Wheels Track like we used to play with as children. Once you let a car go from the top of the track, it is out of your control.

  You idle in front of the Red Ball and you pull the lever on a massive all-knowing slot machine. The first wheel reveals the weather, the second unveils construction and road closures, the third police activity, a fourth shows you the traffic, and still a fifth exists there as a boogeyman. It could be a deer, a pothole, a meteor. There are just too many possibilities to fores
ee. You just know you can’t control them. Two 7’s might get you under 34 hours. Three might get you in shouting distance of 31. Four puts 30 in your sights. No one knew or had felt what it would be like for all five to turn up 7’s.

  I spent a lot of time in prayer that evening. I do not see law breaking cross country records as a God thing but I do believe in his ability to protect me even when I do some stupid things. Prayer is valuable to me in its capacity to help me put my own concerns and problems into perspective and to recognize where preparation invariably meets a margin that is outside of our control. That is how the week had felt. Who would have guessed the most difficult part of this entire process was going to be finding someone to buckle into the seat belt next to you?

  This was one of those moments where I got to stare at the ceiling and think about what was going on in my life. I realized this dream, however farcical and preposterous it might be, was an enormous privilege. People spend their entire lives trying and never get a chance to chase something this hard. I had gotten to the point of truly doing whatever it took to make this a reality.

  There was not a point in my life that I could recall wanting something so badly and going to such lengths to achieve it. It was certainly lofty to believe I was capable. I could say that my preparation was on par with those who had come before me. I had no reason to believe I was less capable than they were as drivers. I did, however, realize what portion of my success was outside of my control and I recognized that I was trying to do something that hundreds if not thousands of people had been trying to accomplish for over forty years. It was amazing company to be in but I could not shake the feeling that I might not belong there.

  I eventually dozed off, still curious what this all must feel like from the perspective of Dave and Dan. I came to find out later, in his own nervousness about the immensity of the undertaking, Dave had told his wife that he would drive with me to New York and if it didn’t feel right, he would abandon the trip and fly home. Dan’s position was very similar.

  The idea begs questions about the dynamic and the diversions inside the car. What did you play on the radio? How was the small talk? Was there a lot of I Spy?

  The actual drive was all business. The drive to New York was all education. As Dave and Dan had no real idea of what to expect, there was a necessary acclimation and experimentation phase that was required. We needed to develop communication methods, protocols, and learn what to expect from each other to make the drive work. Dave was extremely helpful in this regard. Much of his work at IHG was in customer interfaces and experiences. He talked a lot about zen mental focus jargon and other things that might have normally warranted a punch in the face but without someone else on deck I endured the psycho-philosophical mumbo jumbo about hierarchies of needs and idea flows.

  We repositioned some of the phones, iPads, and other devices to make them more usable. We tested the communication devices and tried to figure out how to make the next two days of our lives as comfortable as they could be. I also spent a good deal of time explaining to them what we were doing - Cannonball 101 if you will.

  I told them the history of Cannonball. We talked about what was realistic out of the movies and what was enhanced. We talked about our own driving experiences and about what I had learned from the stories of past competitors. I filled them in on how long I had spent working on this and and tried to get them to understand just what it meant to me. They asked a lot of questions that started with “Why...?”

  I explained to them the choice of the car. They were doubtful of the qualification of a 2004 CL55 AMG but I went through the logic. High power for top speed. Diesels would not have cut it. Forced induction for altitude and fuel economy. The color was halfway between blue and gray which created ambiguity. If someone were to call the cops they could report it as either. When a cop was looking for the car he could interpret it as either.

  Keeping the powertrain stock was for reliability and not sacrificing fuel economy. Dave was very proud of the few seconds that he had spent above 175 mph in his Performante, and questioned why I had not removed the stock electronic limiter on the ECU at 155 mph. The easy answer was because the ECU flashes cost you fuel economy because they come with more power we didn’t need. The more valid answer was fatigue. As fun as it is to chase 200 mph in a street car it is very difficult to process as a driver. The mental decompression time required after spending 5-30 seconds above 150 is long.

  We would have been hitting 175 mph for 30 seconds and then spending the next two minutes at 90 feeling proud of ourselves and letting our brains recover. We could have spent that same 150 seconds traveling at 130 and felt fine. In the first scenario you travel 4.46 miles in 2.5 minutes. In the second you go 5.41 miles. It not exactly a tortoise-hare phenomena but more of a hare versus smarter hare strategy.

  Extra fuel meant extra weight that changed as we burned through it. This beget the need for an active suspension. The Mercedes Active Body Control system measured and leveled each corner of the car multiple times per second and was the best option in the business regardless of cost. It was known to be the achilles heel of reliability so it accounted for a significant portion of the recent maintenance expense. As Dave had been enjoying the warranty status of his Gallardo that was just a few months old, the idea of an $8,800 expense in maintenance on a working car was dumbfounding. Nevermind the percentage of the car’s value that bill represented.

  The tricked out interior with all of the toys was very interesting to my tech savvy compatriots. Admittedly, I had done very little testing of the systems. The CB and Scanner were not picking up much but there was not much trucker traffic around us so it seemed excusable. I had not programmed the frequencies for the Eastern Seaboard states into the active scanner bank so testing it was not possible. I wanted to spend some time testing out the fuel system on the drive up. They were keen to see how it worked as well.

  We had two additional 22 gallon fuel cells mounted in the trunk. Each additional tank had a pump with an output line that y-ed together and fed into a 180 degree turn under the fuel filler cover and down into the filler neck through a modified cap. The flow rate was intentionally fairly slow to avoid potential backups, pressure related leaks, or timing issues. Charles had calculated it to be approximately a gallon every 90 seconds. We were sending the fuel into a 23 gallon main tank. The stock fuel gauge still worked and there was a gauge for each of the two tanks mounted to the dash. They were accurate only on a very basic level.

  The plan was to transfer approximately ten gallons between the tanks four times and for that to occupy the space between 1/4 tank and 3/4 on the factory gauge. Each transfer should take fifteen minutes by Charles’s math. On our way up through North Carolina we tried this for the first time.

  The switch to control the fuel pumps was on a custom panel CarTunes had fabricated to replace the former ashtray on the center console. It also had a switch to kill all of the rear lights, the activation button for the MiRT, the power controls for the Laser Interceptor, and the control panel for the Passport system.

  Around the time our transfer timer got to fourteen minutes a car behind us began flashing its lights and trying to pull up next to us. An angry motorist was not a terribly new or unexpected phenomena so I just expected him to get mad at us for passing too close, going too fast, or just being Ed.

  As he pulled alongside us he motioned to roll the window down. Dave was driving so I obliged him from the passenger seat. He yelled, “You’re leaking gas!”

  Our collective mental image immediately went to a mushroom cloud of flames imminently erupting from the back of our speeding car. Dave started freaking out and I told him to find the next exit or open shoulder so that we could investigate. We cut the transfer pumps and all of a sudden the fuel gauge went from half all the way to the upper limit of its reportable range. There was clearly some latency in its ability to measure.

  During transfer there was a very strong smell of gas outside of the car. It did not really permeate th
e cabin while driving but due to the way the vents work it is clear to an outside observer there is something strange going on behind the scenes. The trunk smelled very strongly of gasoline and that was where the little luggage that we had packed was. We had wrapped it in trash bags to help but I knew any overflowed fuel would have likely run over and through our bags on its way out of the car and onto this good Samaritan’s windshield.

  We immediately exited and found a gas station and Dan had figured out how to remove the safety tab from the fire extinguisher wedged inside of the spare wheel occupying the seat behind Dave. We jumped out of the car and opened the trunk. There was fuel dripping through the fender liner and it smelled of the preeminence of a Derek Zoolander incident but there was no fire to quell. It had not filled the rest of the trunk space with gasoline so we were still equipped with a usable change of clothes. We could not tell exactly how much fuel had leaked but it was at least five gallons. We deduced that our actual transfer rate was a bit over one gallon per minute.

  After the tension finally left our nerves we got back in the car. Dan put the fire extinguisher back in its place and we all stared at each other trying to believe we were not as out of our depth as the past five minutes might have indicated. Each lesson in Cannonball 101 I had taught to Dave and Dan on the way up was a Jenga block. Experiences like this fuel crisis were removing blocks row by row and threatening our stability as a team. I just hoped that we would be able to keep the tower standing long enough to get to Redondo Beach.

  We discussed the route and how I had arrived at the navigational strategy. I had spent a lot of time in Google Maps looking at a balance between the mathematically shortest path and a theoretical fastest route while balancing the clear preference for highway driving and minimizing the number of turns. Every navigational instruction was an opportunity to get lost and that was something I was truly afraid of.