A second police car slid past, its headlights briefly illuminating my M5. Battered. Dented. Filthy. Beautiful.
On the other side of the circle, looming high over the Lamborghinis and Ferraris, sat Rawlings’s black Avalanche, as proud and mysterious as its driver.
I had come to race, but I had a lot to learn. But I’d run with Kenworthy. I’d run with Rawlings. It was time to face them. We had a lot to talk about. I turned back inside. Girls’ laughter cascaded down from the Mandarin Oriental’s penthouse deck.
The private private private after-party in the Mandarin Oriental’s Penthouse Presidential Suite was hosted by Arthur Chirkinian—owner of the Koenigsegg and its 164 mph X5 support car—who, with telepathic wisdom, had invited nearly every Gumballer I longed to talk to.
I had a long discussion with the Koenigsegg’s backup crew that had so tormented us in their X5. “One more question,” I said quietly so as not to upset Arthur, standing nearby, “but what really happened to the Koenigsegg?”
“It’s no secret, mate. Among other things, the clutch went bad into Las Vegas, but Sunday morning VW parts was closed, so he bought a VW Golf, put that clutch in the Koenigsegg, then threw the keys back at the dealer.”
“Wow,” I said. That was an amazing story, even for Gumball.
“There’s more, you see, because that clutch failed as well, so he had these blokes from Jeff ’s Auto Repair in Vegas follow him cross country with more parts, and it’s a good thing they did because—”
“Hang on,” I said. “Did they have to pay them hourly…all the way…here?”
“I really couldn’t say, but the car’s not actually here yet because of another—”
“Excuse me, Alex?” came the voice of a large man behind me—hopefully not a driver I’d cut off.
“Yes?” I turned.
Rob and Mike—Eyhab’s high-speed logistics and support crew—towered over me.
“Alex,” Mike said without any emotion, “we just wanted to thank you, in person, before it was too late.”
“You’re welcome, but…what are you thanking me for?”
“For treating us the same, after you met Rob in San Francisco, after you found out the Lambo and the Spyder weren’t ours.”
Rob nodded in agreement. “Very cool, mate.”
“That’s it,” said Mike, “have a good night.” They each shook my hand, then walked away.
Maher approached. “What was that all about?”
“Good guys, just really good guys.”
“If you say so. How’s your new New Orleans girlfriend?”
“Well”—I sighed—“she wants to fly here and drive back to New York with me.”
“And her dad’s really a D.A.?”
“That’s what she said.”
“That’s either a really bad idea, or the best guy’s daughter to have in the car if you’re stopped for speeding. I hear South Carolina’s really bad.”
“Maher, I swear…I won’t be speeding back.”
“I hope you’re leaving the Polizei stickers on the car.”
“I may never take them off. Any sign of our friend from Texas? Or Lonman?”
“Relax. Rawlings said he was coming, and Kenworthy’s off doing his own thing.”
“His own thing?”
“I dunno, maybe he’s not a party kinda guy.”
“All riiiiight!” the voice of Texas announced from the front door. “Anyone got a cold beer?” The white cowboy hat and I converged on the wet bar. Rawlings placed his Gumball Trophy—a metal bust of Burt Reynolds also in a cowboy hat—on the counter.
“Hey, Polizei! That was real nice running with you today.”
“Yeah, man, where’s Collins? I wanted to thank him.”
“Awwww, Dennis is probably in bed already!”
“Rawlings, seriously, that was really cool of you and Dennis at RadioShack today.”
Somewhere in central Florida I’d accidentally kicked out and broken the M5’s CB-radio power cable—making it impossible to remain useful to our wolf pack—but, amazingly, Rawlings and Collins had volunteered to pull over with us at a nearby RadioShack. Maher hid the M5 alongside the 550 and Avalanche while I ran inside.
“You check your tires, Mr. Pol-eez-eye?”
My heart froze. “What…” I paused, barely capable of speech.
“You should keep a better eye on your boy Dave! Doing donuts behind the Shack with them coppers out looking for us?”
I learned against the bar to maintain my balance.
“Polizei, didja know the three of us were doin’ a buck-thirty past some sheriff ’s wife mowing the lawn? She called him straight up, and that’s what brought all that heat down on us!”
I laughed weakly. “I thought I heard that on the scanner.”
“You know, Alex, you’re the only guy besides me and Dennis who came prepared. I mean, when I saw your car in SF I thought you might have more fancy gear than we did!”
“Rawlings, you should have seen my face when I got my first look inside your truck at the start line.”
Rawlings handed me a beer. “Here’s to running hard! Gumball!”
“Gumball,” I said, clinking bottles. “You guys really kicked ass.”
“Me and my wife and Dennis just came here to have a good time, but it’s really too bad more guys didn’t wanna run with us, I mean really run.”
“What about Kenworthy and those guys? You don’t think they came to run?”
“Sure they did,” said Rawlings. “Those boys are mighty quick. But if you wanna get anywhere fast, you gotta get out front before the slower boys start kicking up the beehive! It woulda been nice to see more of y’all run with me and Dennis. It’s no fun running alone.”
“Well,” I said, looking at his bust on the counter, “that’s why you got that.”
“First to nearly every checkpoint!” he yelled. “Me and Dennis mighta had a little competition if you’d spent a little more time driving than trying not to get arrested!”
He was right. Despite all my strategizing, once I was in the car I’d focused almost completely on what would happen if we were stopped.
It was time for the question.
“Richard,” I said, leaning closer and using his first name for the first time, “have you ever raced cross-country? I mean flat out, no parties, no checkpoints, no stickers?”
“Ooooh”—he hesitated—“you mean like the real Cannonball, like back in the old days?”
“Precisely.”
“Polizei, man, now that shit sounds dangerous.”
“You’ve,” I said slowly, “never done it?”
“Sure would! But somebody’s gotta get some boys together who know what the hell they’re doing!”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s too bad no one’s organizing that.”
“Alex, you hear about another real Cannonball going down, we gotta go. I know Dennis’ll be in. You gotta run against guys you trust, right?”
He didn’t know The Driver. Of all the 2003 Gumballers, Rawlings and Collins were the logical picks for recruitment. The Driver would already know Kenworthy from the 2002 Gumball.
Wherever they went, I’d go.
Handsome Dave’s exact words used when Rawlings received his bust were “—first to nearly every checkpoint—”
The exact words used when Kenworthy received the Fastest Wheels Trophy were “the hardest driver by a mile.”
Maher and I won the Spirit Trophy—apparently Gumball’s greatest honor—for “doing it in the craziest way,” just like Max had said at orientation only five days earlier, “because it goes to whoever best embodies the enthusiasm, creativity, and spirit of Gumball.”
That was probably true. This time.
Gumball really was a rally, a fantastical, amorphous community that coalesced, dispersed, and teleported itself each day, five days a year, between points distant, a surreal universe of which I was a small part, and of which I’d seen a larger but still very small sliver of its mythical
totality. The sliver containing those who came to race. First. Hardest.
Rawlings, Kenworthy, and I had each come for a different race of our own creation, each with different rules, and each of us had won. If only two or more of us played by the same rules, that would be a real race.
This had only been the first battle. I’d earned Rawlings’s respect. Kenworthy knew who I was. But if I wanted to find The Driver, I had to push. Harder. Unless, by some miracle, The Driver called before the 2004 Gumball registration deadline eight months away, I’d be back.
“Richard, you know, you gave me a real shock when we saw you coming out of White Sands going the other way.”
“Wasn’t that funny?”
“How come you weren’t stopped by those cops at the White Sands exit?”
Rawlings shook his head. “Man, I was talking to all the same truckers as you! Didn’t you hear me warn y’all?”
“Wait…that was you? You warned us on the CB when you were going the other way?”
“Hells yeah!” He picked up another beer. “Ain’t I a nice guy?” Interesting. “So,” said Rawlings, “you doing Gumball in Europe next year?”
Kenworthy would be there, as would legends who’d missed 2003—the notorious Kim Schmitz and secretive Peter Malmstrom, names I’d heard spoken in hushed tones but about whom I knew little.
“Dunno, Rawlings. You?”
“Dunno, man, Africa and shit? Sounds dangerous…never driven down there, but if you’re going, let’s talk after this is over.”
“Done.”
I hoped he would be. Rawlings was a fierce competitor, but if disaster struck and I needed help, I’d trust him.
Eight hours earlier, after another Reifenpanne, after he and Collins left the Ocala Hooters checkpoint ten minutes ahead of us, after Maher caught up with them for the second time, after I encouraged Maher to pass and push to the finish line ahead of them, after I told Maher to disregard the fuel gauge…we ran out of gas.
Rawlings and Collins passed. I called out on the CB for help.
Rawlings answered, imploring us to get the M5 rolling just one more mile to the overpass, where, sitting on the shoulder by the mile marker, exactly like one of two I’d seen strapped to the back of a black Chevy Avalanche parked in front of the Fairmont in San Francisco—we found a bright red jerry can full of gas.
AUGUST 2003
I reached for the second most important box in my life—an unassuming little brown cardboard cube sitting on a shelf in my lobby’s mail room—and ripped it open before the elevator doors closed behind me.
It was Brock Yates’s Cannonball! memoir.
Of course Gumball was nothing like Cannonball.
The majority of Cannonballers drove coast-to-coast, nonstop, in 35 to 40 hours, during which the lead drivers sustained average speeds of over 80 mph—a Herculean feat even today. The 2003 Gumball took five days to cover 3,350 miles—the longest stage a 12-to 15-hour run over 924 miles.
But those few serious Gumballers who raced—forced to use every tool and tactic possible to avoid being stopped merely for being stickered—suffered a trial by fire far harsher than any Cannonballer. The fraction of Gumballers who finished virtually unmolested by police—among them Rawlings, Collins, and myself—possessed skills and instincts untaught anywhere, at any price, and utterly useless anywhere but on the secret race the Gumball wasn’t.
Were Gumball all there was or had ever been, I’d return ever year until I died, but that Rawlings and Collins existed at all—yearning and hoping for something beyond even the surreal madness of Gumball, that on the final night I felt closer to them than anyone outside my oldest friends, that there were others seemingly like us yet unknown to me—meant I was right.
I wasn’t alone.
Hillary had to climb Everest, Bannister had to run the four-minute mile, and we felt the inexorable pull of a distant, mythological journey across America, a race that—whenever people like Rawlings and I met—became inevitable.
Nonstop. No parties. No checkpoints. No bullshit.
If only someone would invite us.
I completed the first page of the book before the elevator door opened on my floor. Within hours I’d learned that racing legend Dan Gurney (whose control of a Ferrari Daytona was described by copilot Yates as that of “a virtuoso playing…a fine instrument,”) set the inaugural 1971 Cannonball record of 35:54, and that this was later shattered when David Heinz and David Yarborough, civilians nowhere as skilled as the F1 legend, set the final 32:51 Cannonball record in 1979.
“Laser and radar jammers remain unproven,” Yates wrote, calling the CB network “raggedly unpredictable.”
But Maher and I had had a 99 percent success rate in mapping, spotting, and avoiding police, and our two traffic stops occurred only because we’d failed to heed our V1.
“The time for Cannonball-style races is over,” Yates wrote, citing increased law enforcement, liability, traffic, and urban sprawl. But I was among several Gumballers, all in stickered cars far more conspicuous than the stealthy Cannonballers’, who finished with but two tickets—par with several top-five Cannonball finishers.
As for traffic and sprawl, in 1999 Yates drove cross-country—through a snowstorm, with his son, in a stock Chrysler 300M—in 38 hours, then said 36 hours remained “within the realm of possibility.”
There had to be a secret race out there.
Had to be.
CHAPTER 16
What You Get for the Statue of Liberty
I waited for the call for months, but it was always Gumballers wanting to go clubbing in New York, or party at Eyhab’s London mansion, or invite me to dinner in Paris. I befriended Frankl and Michael Ross—the watermelon-helmeted owner of the 28 whom I’d seen arrested just after the 2003 start—at the L.A. premiere of the Gumball movie that November, and Maher began dating Emma, a six-foot three-inch English model who worked for Ross’s girlfriend. My superficial star turn in the movie led fans and Gumballers to call for technical and legal advice, as if my schizophrenic months of preparation only one year earlier made me an authority. Even Morgan called, improbably asking if I would officiate and witness his wedding to Kira that afternoon in New York before they flew home to England. Virtually everyone I asked expressed interest in a Cannonball revival, but none admitted being aware of—let alone invited to—one.
The Driver wasn’t going to call. I had to hone my skills on the 2004 Gumball. That’s where I’d find Kenworthy, Kidd, Macari, Schmitz, and a new driver whose real name no one knew. A driver known only from online rumors and fan gossip. A driver who—whether or not he understood the true nature of the Gumball Spirit Trophy—had declared the 2003 winner his prime target, the man he intended to defeat at all costs.
A driver who had declared me Public Enemy number one.
A driver named Torquenstein.
MAY 3, 2004
PARIS, FRANCE
GUMBALL-2
2300 HOURS (APPROX)
“So…er…Alex…what do you think of him now?”
I stood beside George Gurley, the Vanity Fair writer assigned to my Royal Canadian Mounted Police Pursuit M5 for Gumball ’04.
A candy-apple-red Dodge Viper spun in circles not 20 feet away, its engine revving wildly, its wide tires scrabbling on Paris’s famously uneven pavement, chirping and spitting out increasingly large clouds of acrid smoke. The fans whooped, hollered, clapped, cheered, laughed, and shouted.
The driver was approximately five nine, yet looked smaller at the helm of the North Dakota–plated 700-horsepower Hennessy Venom 650R Viper currently spinning in place; he wore a suit of black leather armor, belts and cross straps, matching shoulder pads, and driving gloves lined with spikes that made him appear to be the result of a strange mating between a medieval knight and an S&M club habitué. He completed the look with black-lensed goggles over a face-concealing helmet topped with small red horns.
“So?” George huffed, as we watched the spectacle from behind a large tree.
I looked at the fantastic structure looming above us—built for the 1889 World’s Fair, one of the great symbols of Parisian architecture and French culture, one of the most recognized symbols in human history, atop which countless couples had met, fallen in love, and proposed—from which a thousand grand lights shone carelessly upon the sideshow unfolding at its feet.
“They built that.” I gestured at the Eiffel Tower. “They gave us the Statue of Liberty. “We gave them…Torquenstein.”
FIVE MONTHS EARLIER
DECEMBER 2003
NEW YORK
“You’re really screwed,” said The Weis, standing before a laptop on my kitchen counter.
“Let me see that.” I jumped out of the office chair from where I’d been perusing the Gumball forums—hunting for hints of equipment I might have overlooked—and from where, having just discovered a thread about a new and apparently very well-prepared entrant, I’d found his website address, www.torquenstein.net, and had read it out loud to The Weis.
“Holy shit!” I exclaimed.
“This looks bad,” said The Weis.
“This is bad.”
“This guy looks really serious. Who is he?”
“I don’t know.”
The Weis clicked on Torquenstein’s car-page link, nodding with grudging admiration at the $200,000 Dodge Viper. He raised his eyebrows—and my heart sank—when he scrolled down to a picture of a lemon-yellow Hummer H2 support truck.
“This is bad.” The Weis placed a hand on my shoulder. “For you.”
Torquenstein’s equipment list duplicated mine, and he was adding my dream support vehicle, replete with tools, spare tires, parts, and emergency jerry cans. His budget for emergency gear, the support car, and entry fees for both it and its personnel had to exceed $200,000. Of the hundred and fifty or so entrants in the upcoming 2004 Gumball, Torquenstein was the only one I knew of better prepared than I.
Despite my experience—and probably because of it—the 2004 Gumball seemed far more daunting than the 2003. The route was Paris to somewhere in Spain, then Morocco (almost certainly in and out via the port city of Tangier), Barcelona (to coincide with the Formula 1 race there on May 9), and ending Cannes, for the first day of its film festival.
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