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

by Ed Bolian

  The oil requirement threatened to foil that. The oil cap and filler neck go through the driver’s side valve cover. I had no idea if I could open the cap with the car running. I assumed that it might spew oil everywhere. I called Charles, our Lambo tech. I called Brian, our service manager. I called my advisor from the Mercedes dealership. No one answered. We were 9 hours 4 minutes and 900 miles into a very intense drive and I did not want to risk the engine detonating in the middle of Illinois.

  Dan grabbed the paper towels. I pulled over and electronically opened the trunk before shutting off the car. I set about releasing the cap and Dave grabbed a liter of oil. It was orchestral. As I poured the first I decided that it was probably a good idea to put a bit more in because there was no way that the threshold for an alert was just one liter. Dave grabbed the second liter we had packed. I put about a third of it in, tightened down the cap, and then we hopped back in the car.

  The error message went off and all systems were go. Well, they were as much go as they were going to get. The police scanner didn’t work at all. It had worked quite well when I was running it around my house but when Forrest and I had programmed it for this trip we had messed up. We went county by county for the entire route through a frequency database web site and put approximately 1,400 frequencies in. It was the most advanced civilian level scanner I could find but it simply could not get through all of them quickly enough to find and grab an active frequency before we moved away from it and the strength became useless. We needed to have separated the country into separate banks of frequencies.

  The CB was not working very well either. It had enough knobs and we had enough inexperience to properly booger it up. We played with it and consulted a couple of YouTube tutorials but it did not improve much. The 90 degree flexing of the K40 Antenna was not helping at speed. It appeared based on some gurgled responses that we could broadcast fairly well but such capability did not feel very useful at the time.

  We resigned ourselves to a simple idea. Messages from the CB or Scanner could only slow us down. Nothing could motivate us to go any faster. We were driving as fast as we sustainably could every single moment on the road. The occasional blip from the V1 caused a short lift but those were usually dismissed easily. We didn’t see any cops set up as speed traps. I recall passing a couple going in the opposite direction where we either braked down to a less conspicuous speed or we used the cover from a tractor trailer to occlude their line of sight.

  The logic says if you need an average in the low 90’s and you can minimize your stops then you should be able to drive between 95 and 105 most of the time and wind up where you need to be. The idea of going balls out the whole way and only stopping for gas or cops is admittedly sexier but that was not my planned strategy. Alex and I had discussed the driving protocols that led to his time and it was generally apparent that Richard Rawlings and Dennis Collins had done something very similar, albeit with several short pulls up close to 200 mph mixed in for good measure and bragging rights. They cruised along a few miles per hour above their desired average and waited for the average to climb.

  David Diem and Doug Turner had claimed to have used a 155-55-0 strategy in their drive, cruising at 155 mph the whole time, slowing to 55 to past cops, and stopping for their five fuel stops and single ticket. In his dissection of their run, Alex Roy concluded that the fuel economy at a cruising speed that high failed to add up and resolved that they must have cruised at 95-110 the entire time. Although his final co-driver David Maher changed the strategy, initially Roy planned to rarely exceed 100 for more than a minute or two at a time. I had gone into the drive anticipating something similar.

  The execution of our strategy had taken a turn due to the confidence imparted by some initial success and optimistic reports of what was ahead. We were pushing as hard as we could but it carried with it the looming feeling that it was on borrowed time. I knew that Alex had carried a high 90’s average into the first Oklahoma toll plaza when he had a fuel system failure and I had heard that Rawlings was set to break 30 hours until he got caught in some miserable traffic in New Mexico. Would one of the slot machine wheels finally catch up to us and sideline our journey?

  Dave had taken over driving once we added the oil and I got in touch with Tom Greulich who was going to lead us through Missouri. We left I-70 and took 255 around St Louis. We gave up the chance to see the iconic arch but we missed a lot of construction based on the instructions from Tom. He was extremely excited to be helping and loved the idea of the record. It seems like just about everyone who has been a car guy in the past forty years has at least contemplated the trip.

  It was 172 miles through Illinois. Including the two minute stop for oil, we did it in 1 hour 44 minutes at an average of 99.23 mph. Into Missouri we hopped onto 44 and continued along. Tom was feeding us great info but ultimately there was not much to report.

  The Cannonball accounts and the US Express documentation talked a lot about the sensation of seeing the sunrise over St Louis. There were some wonderful aged videos in the Cory Welles documentary that beautifully illustrated the emotions that you feel coming out of the first night of driving. It is difficult to describe the confusingly demoralizing refreshment of not being in jail, the car still running, being on schedule, finally being able to see well, coming across a lot more traffic on the road, and still having about 1,700 miles to go. You want to be able to look at each other as you relish in the victory of getting there with a resounding “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!” but in reality you just want to get some sleep and have a shower.

  During the time that Tom was serving as our scout car I got an email. Since Dave was driving I looked down to see what it was. It happened to be a Facebook alert. That seemed like an appropriately mindless distraction from the day’s work. It wasn’t.

  The email said that a friend had just tagged me in a post. Tom Greulich had a new status update - “Up early this morning helping a friend break some records - with Ed Bolian.” I texted him immediately asking him to take it down. I knew that the risk was low but the last thing I needed was for one of his friends to know a cop and to put two and two together. If you browse through either of our profiles it becomes pretty easy to glean from a post like that we might be up to no good in a car. He obliged and we continued on our merry way.

  Whatever pace the US Express guys were talking about when seeing the sun coming up in St Louis was far behind ours because it was still pitch black. I had never liked night driving. The visibility is worse and hazards are harder to see. In Atlanta there is traffic generally twenty four hours a day. My midnight runs around 285 in college were rarely in as much solitude as I would have liked. Our speeds during the course of the previous night had actually harkened me back to one of the first group drives that I organized at the dealership.

  I called ten customers and told them that we were meeting at a restaurant near the start of a less trafficked state highway at 11 PM. We ate quickly and snapped some pictures of the rainbow of assembled Lamborghinis. We had a newly released Aventador, two Twin Turbo Gallardos with over 1,000 hp, and a handful of regular Gallardos there including my blue ex-Kimmi-the-prostitute mobile standing tall in the company of cars with indistinguishably less sordid pasts.

  We started a conference call and everyone was using Bluetooth. We sent a guy in a BMW M3 out ahead and all hung back. We spent the next two hours taking turns getting about 2-3 miles worth of clearance and blasting off for as long as we felt like holding the accelerator down. I hit 185 mph with a measly 492 hp. Interestingly the stock horsepower output of a 2004-2005 Lamborghini Gallardo is exactly one less than my CL55 AMG. The guys with more hp were tickling 200 and shooting flames all over the place on each shift and lift. It was an amazing night where no one got hurt, no cars were injured in the making of the production, and no one who could have gotten upset ever knew about it.

  That was the way that Brock Yates and Dan Gurney had described their success in the 1972 Cannonball Baker Sea to Shining Sea Mem
orial Trophy Dash. Apart from the one ticket Gurney received, they claimed they blasted across the country at speeds up to 172 mph and that no one even knew about it. They said they broke all of these laws that they were protesting against and no one was the wiser, certainly no one had been hurt.

  Either they were lying or we were doing things a bit differently. As the sun eventually came up and the roads become more congested, we had to maneuver the car more to maintain pace. Dave and I had some lengthy discussions about the posture of the car and strategies to minimize the risk of having the bystanding motorists call the police. I am sure that despite my best efforts there were a lot of interesting 911 calls as we also set the record for getting flicked off the most times in a 24 hour period. We said that an improvement we would have made was the addition of a scrolling digital message across the rear right section of the bumper with some sincere sounding apologies. Admittedly, reading something on a car at a 50 mph differential is difficult regardless of how upset you are.

  Perhaps Yates had been correct and this was just a way the changing landscape of motor vehicle traffic in America was manifesting itself. They simply spent more time with no one around. Of all the interesting statistics that show how different 1970 was from 2013, one that I think it most interesting is the number of households. In 1970 the US Census reported that there were 63.5 million households. In 2010 there were over 114 million. They were not all in urban high-rises so the geographic distribution of Americans was much more expansive. I think the longest we went without seeing a car was less than five minutes. For the 70’s crowd it could have been an hour.

  I tried to make sure that there was no steering input as we would pass a car, the same way that you would treat a slalom cone. That meant there would be minimal suspension lean perceivable outside of the car which would trigger less anxiety from the people we were passing. It seemed to work.

  Dave continued to drive through Missouri after picking up in the stop for my stint that had been abbreviated by the oil top off. The system was working. I was constantly giving him feedback that he was doing well, the coast was clear, and it was safe for him to stay on it. The most useful instruction that I recall giving him was that “Dave, I am going to make you drive 10 mph faster everywhere.” It was imperative for the passenger to take ownership of how fast the driver could go. When I did that and took the onus of making more frequent instructions and in essence clearing him for acceleration more often, he responded beautifully.

  I had left Adam Kochanski with the login information for the GeoForce tracking device. When morning came back in Atlanta I got a text from him. He said, “You guys are really flying. You just need to average 90 and you will break it. It is actually a little bit below that but I am not going to tell you what that is. Keep it up!” There was no bad weather to report and the construction monitoring sites he could check were still clear.

  In 2 hours 31 minutes of driving, Dave averaged 105.30 mph on his 265 mile shift. About 11 and a half hours into the drive we stopped to change drivers near Springfield, Missouri. I took over to finish out that tank of gas. I continued out of Missouri and into Oklahoma along the Will Rogers Turnpike and got onto 40. Although the strain of navigation had not been difficult, it was quite a relief to have made it to the road where we would spend the lion’s share of the trip mileage. As ridiculous as it sounds, it was like navigating the twisty bits of a race track and finally making your way onto the front straight. However hard you have been pushing, it had to be tempered by not wanting to overrun a turn. Now it was hammer down to an even greater extent.

  There was a lot of anxiety at the first toll plaza. Dave pointed out the shoulder where he had seen the blue BMW M5 pulled over in the film. I had ordered toll passes for all areas we would pass through (stupidly in my personal name) so we did not have to stop. We breezed through the toll plazas maintaining a reasonable speed. Many states issue average speed tickets by mail when you pass through toll plazas in less time than you ought to. Fortunately none ever showed up.

  Megan had slept in after the Halloween party and did not make it to church that Sunday morning. I got a text message from the guy that taught our newly married Sunday School class with me asking if I was going to be there to help. It occurred to me that I had not told him I was going to be otherwise indisposed that morning. I was driving and we were not responding to most of the text messages, emails, and calls so I let him figure that out on his own.

  I was worried about Oklahoma and Texas. The last time I had driven through there in this way was on the 2004 rally and I had gotten five tickets. I eventually got them disposed of but they don’t like speeders from other states in Texas. I think they don’t like people of any kind that aren’t from Texas. I had generally familiarized myself with the speeding and reckless driving laws around the country but had not dwelt on them too heavily. The monster under your bed is a lot less scary if you never think about what he actually looks like.

  The five ticket day had been exceptional for me. I don’t speed often in routine driving. I was pulled over near my house the other day for going 66 in a 45 that I had always thought was a 55. When the officer approached and revealed my misunderstanding about the speed limit, I asked for some consideration of the fact that I had not had a ticket in about seven years. When he returned to the car he said, “You know, nines times out of ten, when someone tells me that it is a lie but it has actually been ten years since your last ticket. You have a nice day now.” He let me go.

  As I actually thought about it, the last ticket I had received was driving to see Megan at the University of Georgia to go out to dinner on the three month anniversary of our first date and it had been a decade since then. The irony abounds.

  I do get pulled over a lot but it is frequently just for a police officer to see whatever car I happen to be driving. Getting pulled over in a sports car is fun. There are some easy answers to the normal barrage of cop questions.

  “Sir, do you know how fast you were going?”

  “Not really officer, I really wasn’t trying to speed though.”

  “I clocked you at 105.”

  “Well for whatever it is worth, I was not trying to go that fast. If I were, it goes way faster than that. The car is nuts. Would you like to drive it?” Most cops are car guys but they aren’t allowed to drive civilian cars while on duty.

  “Oh, I can’t do that. Besides my belt and gun would hurt those pretty leather seats.”

  “I am not worried about it, I will be happy to hold your gun.” This usually generates quite a good laugh.

  “Not today son.”

  “Well here is my business card, call me sometime and we can go for a ride when you are off duty.” An invitation to pick this conversation up at a later and non-prosecutorial date.

  I have engaged in that exact exchange many times and always gotten off with a warning. Only one has ever taken me up on the return trip for a ride. I was giving press rides at The Master’s Golf Tournament in Augusta, Georgia in a rear wheel drive Grigio Telesto Gallardo LP550 Bicolore. I was sliding around turns on residential streets and generally misbehaving. Before long every cop in Richmond County showed up and I began my routine exchange. After being dismissed and asked to keep it down, one deputy returned a few hours later for his ride. He told me that he knew a road that we could get some speed on and it was just around the corner.

  That corner was about twenty five minutes away and I obliged him although my reluctance increased as the trip lengthened. He told me he had been 180 mph in a Corvette ZR1 there. That was interesting. Chevrolet brought the ZR1 badging back in 2009 with a supercharged version of the C6 body cars. They were very quick but I fancied my Italian Bull to be up to besting it. As we drove I asked the cop how the surface of this road was. He told me that it had been awhile since he had been there so he wasn't sure. This was in 2011 so that struck me as being strange. I said, “Really, what year was the ZR1?”

  “1991.” He said calmly.

  “You mean you hav
en't been to this road in twenty years? How far from here is it?”

  “Oh, it was 95 or 6. It is just around this bend.” This time he was telling the truth. As I rounded the next bend in the Southeast Georgia road, I saw it.

  “That is a bridge. Bridges are very bad places to speed. They have crosswinds.”

  “Oh we will be fine, let’s see what it can do!”

  “That is also a long bridge. We might be able to go fast but that bridge goes into South Carolina and I have a feeling that whatever jurisdiction you enjoy while wearing your work clothes ends halfway along it.”

  “Oh yeah, but if we need to run I know all of the good places to hide,” he offered reassuringly.

  “That is not a contingency I was planning on while going top speed hunting with a police officer riding shotgun.” I had voiced my concerns and given the little bit of traffic that was on the bridge time to clear. Despite many reasons not to, I took the cop on a ride out onto the bridge. We clipped along to about 160. The air was stable and the surface was fine. I turned the car around and stopped in the street as the single oncoming car made its way into Frank Underwood nation.

  I floored the Lamborghini and spun the rear wheels into third gear with the traction control on but limited. I pushed on, redline shifting, and perceiving the childish ear to ear grin of the portly, middle-aged Sheriff's deputy. We ran out of bridge before I could hit 200 but I know we hit the happy side of 190 on the Gallardo’s difficult to read speedo. He was thrilled.

  I drove him to his house on the outskirts of Augusta where his wife and young daughter were waiting to photograph him getting out of the car. As I climbed out of the cockpit to greet them, his wife said, “Sir, you have made his life. I bet once a week he says something about that black Lamborghini that those purty gals drove in the Cannonball Run movie. Is that what this is?”