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

by Ed Bolian

  Chris was broke. He was very interested and ready to drive when asked to but he was not able to contribute financially. I knew we had about ten grand worth of equipment to buy and I still needed a car to do it in. I had sold the Gallardo a couple of months prior and was actually driving a 2005 Porsche Cayenne S that had spent some serious time under water. It had a Florida Certificate of Destruction rather than a normal vehicle title so we were unable to sell it as a dealership and just kept it around to run errands in. It had been a trade on a Lotus Evora. You get weird trades on Lotuses.

  Cory Welles spontaneously released the movie that she had been working on for nearly a decade. It was called 32 Hours 7 Minutes and it chronicled the US Express events of the 1980s. It intersected early on with Alex Roy. Alex had found Cory mid-project and offered interest, investment, and continuation. Cory was a friend of Doug Turner, half of the team that set the long standing record in 1983. Their phenomenal time was met with doubt and criticism by other US Express participants. Her film set out to prove the time was possible. Alex became her vessel of proof.

  The movie was brilliant. It told the story in an exciting, historically relevant way. It continued to reveal more and more about how Alex had broken the record as well. This was an idea I found particularly intriguing. It filled in some of the gaps left by his book. Seeing parts of the drive on video was also great to help address the massive foreign elephant in the room of what the in-car psychology of attempting this might be like.

  I made a list of cars to consider. The Mercedes AMG cars were still mathematically about as good as it gets but they were getting old. The high mileage ones were nearly cheap enough to be disposable but they would require an unforeseeable amount of maintenance to get truly ready to go. The newer 6.2L AMG cars got bad gas mileage and were 200-300% the price of the earlier cars without any clear benefit.

  The 2010 Porsche Panamera Turbo was getting closer to affordability now that the Gallardo was out of the picture but based on the $16k I had paid for Megan’s five-year-old Cayenne S just a couple of years prior I had a pretty good ghost-of-Christmas-future idea of what that $70k investment would turn into before too long. Also, when I put the fuel cells in the rear hatch I would need new heat shielding to protect the passenger areas due to the open design.

  The 2004-2006 Bentley Continental GT had always seemed interesting. They were the same $70k they had been for the prior three years but it almost seemed worth it. The twin turbo 552 hp W12 was beastly. It had a slightly more confined rear seat than a CL and a very complicated vacuum system that could be perilously expensive to address if something went wrong. Parts and maintenance were sure to be a problem. I would rather be associated with breaking this record in a Bentley than a Mercedes if that counted for anything.

  The Lotus Evora was the only car capable of exceeding 150 mph and getting 30 mpg on the highway. The North American headquarters was thirty minutes from the authorized dealership I worked for. The back seat is optional which is another word for useless. A third passenger was not possible and there was no great place for the extra fuel.

  I toyed for a bit on using the 2005 Ferrari 612 from the rental fleet. It had some room for fuel and 532 hp out of a 5.75L V12. The car was extremely comfortable and difficult to identify by anyone but a die hard enthusiast. It did not have cruise control which seemed like a risk and I was not sure I could cut into the dash for all of the electronics. I also had about 11 years and $198,000 worth of payments left on it. I could not imagine having another decade of debt obligation required just to keep the car I came to prize. Those remaining payment coupons would add a lot of salt to the wound if the car were seized or destroyed in the process.

  Clearly I had never been one to keep a car for a long time. I knew that it would be tough to part with the car that we broke the record in if everything went to plan so vanity weighed on the decision a bit. It would be the car that I would show my grandkids, the grandkids I was clearly not going to be able to avoid having based on the persistence of my wife.

  Life threw another wrench in my Cannonball-car’s way in the form of a kryptonite car. An Arancio Atlas 2008 Lamborghini Murcielago LP640 Roadster popped up on the market with 24k miles. It had $80k in recent service history and was the cheapest one there had ever been. It was my dream car, in my favorite color, in the roofless configuration that would allow me to sit up straight for once. I had to have it.

  It exuded every positive impression that had been tattooed on my brain during that first Murcielago test drive as a seventeen year old, screeching around a slow moving tractor to the chagrin and terror of the unsuspecting salesperson. Getting a ghost-faced passenger praying to God while his fingernails dug into the leather of a $300,000 Italian sports car is not the evangelism that Matthew was talking about but it must count for something. It was nirvana seeing an orange LP640, believing that I could get financed for it, and having some trade credits sitting at the dealership from previous disposal of the rental fleet that I could use to avoid any taxes.

  Being around exotic cars all day poses some problems in the personal preference front. I obviously want pretty much all of them but I am constrained by budget and my ability to finance these cars. That set some parameters but because of having the huge car loans open for so long with Supercar Rentals, I had better car-buying credit than all but a handful of my customers. The finance terms were amazing. I put down nothing, paid no sales taxes due to the use of the 612 and the prostitute Gallardo as trades, financed the car for 12 years/144 months, and had a payment of $1,799. It was perfection.

  For me, though, the LP640 iteration of the Murcielago is the benchmark. It occupies that $175-250k price point where you also find the Ferrari 458, McLaren 12C, Aston Martin Vanquish, a nice 599, and some other options. The thing about it is, they are just not as cool as the big V12 doorstop-wedge-aerodynamics Murcielago. It is the most useless car ever built and it comes from a heritage of other completely useless cars. You can’t see out of it, the transmission barely works in traffic or reverse, the engine is completely inaccessible and must be removed for most servicing, the all wheel drive system is tuned to work perfectly at 200 mph and only marginally at daily speeds, it gets eight miles per gallon most of the time and five when you are having fun, women can’t get in or out without revealing the color of their underpants, and it can barely go over a speed bump. Add in the Roadster factor and you can’t drive in the rain, even with the roof on. It leaks and the only windshield wiper hits the leading edge of it every swoop even after you’ve spent twenty minutes installing it under an overpass. Imagine a car still worth it even after all that! It is the male version of a five-inch stiletto. Worth every ounce of the pain for that look and performance.

  Because I had purchased the Murci, the more expensive record car options were out the window. Five days later I bought a 2004 Mercedes CL55 AMG with 100k miles. It was a nice car with a little paint work, good options, needed some tires, and some general cleaning. I bought it for $17,000.

  The feeling of getting back on the horse with these two goals of having a cool exotic car and pursuing the Cannonball record was phenomenal. My life was at a point of stability with Megan and with our finances that these decisions could be justified. I also went to our local reptile trade show and purchased a baby Sunglow Albino Red Tail Boa Constrictor and named her Sunny the LamBoa. I suppose while the thought had been to dip a toe or two in the proverbial swimming pool of the vices I had been neglecting for a few years, this was probably more of a cannonball.

  It felt real this time. It was as close as it had ever been. The conversations began to get more intentional with the compatriots I needed to make the drive a reality.

  Through local car events I had become good friends with a guy named Adam Kochanski. At the time he had a great vertical collection of BMW M3’s. He had a 1995 Daytona Violet E36 M3 coupe, a Phoenix Yellow 2001 E46 M3 track car, and an Alpine White 2008 E90 M3 Sedan. I get more impressed than I probably should by these types of vertically g
enerational car collections. It carries a true connoisseur status. I had long aspired to amassing a similarly generational collection of the V12 Lamborghini lineage.

  I told him about the plan to try to break the record and he was immediately fascinated by the idea. Like Chris, he was not in a position to contribute financially but he was available to drive or help as needed. I needed a co-driver, support passenger, someone to stay home and monitor weather, people to help with installation, and some help with verification. There would be lots of roles to fill and he seemed capable of bringing some strong skillsets to the table. Adam had read Alex’s book and was enthusiastic about the outlaw craft of cross country road racing.

  Work continued to pick up and I stayed very busy. I was thoroughly enjoying the Murcielago and daily driving the CL. Megan had driven the CL on one occasion and managed to run over something the size of a mobile home park. It broke the undertray and one of the front wheels. I needed a set of spares anyway so I found some on eBay and wound up with 1.75 sets of AMG wheels for the car. Fall was fast approaching and it was clear that there would be no chance for a 2012 attempt before the weather got too risky.

  I called Alex Roy to catch up. He was still engaged in a bitter legal battle with Cory Welles where he claimed he had not authorized the release of the film or the final cut. Rather than pursuing a theatrical or festival release she had done an internet straight to DVD release. I told him again that I was serious about an attempt and we talked for a bit about the landscape of challengers he had faced since going public with his record five years prior.

  He believed that five to seven people per year attempted the drive. He said in the time that he had held the record, he only believed that three had a shot, me being one of them. That felt like quite an honor. We talked through my strategy, the car that we were using, route preferences, legitimacy, and verification. It was an extremely positive and helpful conversation. He was a bit cagey about his approval of my decisions, but I could tell that he just loved talking about it. It was like asking Kimmi about her favorite swimsuit bottoms - right in the wheelhouse.

  I started building the war room in our home office. I met various times over the winter with the team of people that were interested in some level of involvement in the project. I still had no one who was interested in or capable of helping me financially with the undertaking but I had resolved myself to the idea of footing the bill myself. The target date at this point was May of 2013.

  The car was right. It had 493 hp, a great advantage to the 400 that the M5 that Alex had used. The forced induction would also help with altitude variation and fuel economy. Fuel range was a huge issue. You have to go extremely fast to make up for each stop. Alex had used an auxiliary sixteen gallon fuel cell to extend his range but he still required six fuel stops. I wanted to cut that to three. The easy math was 3000 miles = 4 tanks of gas = 750 mile range @ 15 mpg = 50 gallons required. The stock tank on the CL was 23 gallons so I needed at least another 27. Full emptying was not likely so building a cushion was necessary. Also, even though the actual route was 2813 miles, fuel economy would be less than 15. I enlisted our resident Lamborghini technician to help me with sourcing and installation. He was friends with Vincent Luongo, the Lamborghini technician who had installed the fuel cell in Dennis Collins’s Ferrari.

  That fuel was going to be heavy. I needed an adjustable suspension to compensate for the weight reduction over time as we burned through the fuel and to keep the car level. Gasoline weighs about six pounds per gallon so we would have just over four hundred pounds of fuel on board when full. The achilles heel of reliability for that generation of Mercedes was the Active Body Control hydraulic suspension. It was perfect but getting it fully operational at this age was going to be quite an expensive undertaking. There was no better option out there. Also, the CL was already a heavy car so the weight change was less likely to alter the handling characteristic than a smaller sports car. I would have been fine with a CL or a third S Class but after spending 10k miles driving this CL it was clear that the big 2+2 coupe was a much better handling car than the S sedan.

  Although 2003 was the first year of availability for this car, it was poetic that it was a 2004 - the year of inception of my idea of personally challenging the record. If I had unlimited funding for the project back then, I would have certainly wandered into a Mercedes showroom and purchased one brand new. In fact, in 2004 I had pretended I was going to do just that and driven a $137,000 white version of this car that was now being prepared for electrical dissection. I think the excuse I had used to avoid a commitment to purchase at the time was a need to check out the newly released Bentley Continental GT before making a decision on which would make a better cross country race car.

  The list of countermeasures was growing. I had long used a Valentine 1 radar and laser detector. The positive reviews you find about the V1 on the internet are all correct. Forrest, the countermeasure enthusiast friend I had from Georgia Tech, and I went through the shopping list and we decided since the frontal reception in the units were stronger we needed to use another one mounted backwards on the rear glass. His Bacon Blocker Radar Jammer remained in the “nearing completion” phase it had enjoyed for three years.

  For the sake of redundancy we also wanted to use the Passport/Escort detector system for radar. That included a frontal laser Jammer that had fairly poor reviews so I bought a full Laser Interceptor system to install for redundancy as well. Navigation and documentation were key and the ten year old system in the Mercedes was useless so I bought two of the biggest and best rated Garmin Nuvi systems with XM Traffic Data to use. I ordered a Cobra 29, a fully adjustable and programmable citizens band radio with a K40 whip antenna. I also got a Uniden Bearcat Digital Trunking Police Scanner and its associated GPS and radio antennas. I called up GeoForce, the tracking company I had used for the rental cars, and asked them for another unit with a monitoring plan. We started looking into methods of enhancing the lighting of the car as well but struggled to be impressed by any available options beyond an HID kit.

  I built a shopping list for other supplies we would need for the car - a jack, fire extinguisher, urine bottles, bed pans, duct tape, electrical tape, double stick tape, spare fuses, spare fluids, fasteners, flashlights, binoculars, chewable vitamins (C, B, Multi), nutrition bars, candy bars, energy drinks, pure sugar candy, sports beverages with electrolytes, and bottled water. Lots of time was spent staring at the car and the cockpit trying to imagine where everything might fit.

  The biggest advantage that Alex and I had discussed in doing this type of thing in 2013 rather than 2006 was the prevalence and capability of smartphones. He had an early generation Blackberry on his runs but that was nothing compared to an iPhone and tethered iPad for apps like Waze, Trapster, and Google Maps. I made sure to stock up on cradles, chargers, and mounts for multiple phones and tablets. These were the only potential game changing factors that he saw between 2006 and 2012-13.

  Forrest was continuing on the Bacon Blocker and the MiRT. A MiRT is a traffic light changer as employed by ambulances. Rawlings had used one of these as well. Both of them were coming along. He had the control board designed for the radar jammer and he claimed that the MiRT was a walk in the park. We talked for a short moment about the penalties of using each. It was illegal to use any active radar jammer without FCC permitting. I hear that speeding is actually illegal too. Obviously our use did not merit such a permit. Violation of those rules can result in a one year minimum prison sentence and a $10,000 fine. The MiRT was legal to own but illegal to use or sell. We were good there since it would not be in use during any heavy speeding.

  We needed a plan to control the uncontrollable variables. Weather, traffic, construction, and accidents could each throw massive wrenches into our time and progress along the route. Also new since Alex did the run was traffic information by satellite radio and by mobile internet. Weather was impossible to predict very far out but we knew that spring and fall were better than summer. I also
ruled out summer due to the heat and the likelihood that we would not use the air conditioning during the ride to conserve power and fuel economy. Later contemplation and experimentation revealed that using the AC was an absolute necessity and that other comfort options such as windows/sunroof created much more parasitic drag.

  Construction data was available by phone for each state but not compiled in a very digestible way. Waze kept good data but there was no way to know how many users would be available in a given area as we passed through. My plan became to deploy some spotters up ahead. This would effectively create our own custom Waze style network for people up ahead to alert us to pertinent issues.

  The route was also a challenge. For me, the starting and ending points were easy. This had always been the bone of contention between Alex Roy and Richard Rawlings. Richard claimed a Cannonball Record, Alex claimed a transcontinental record. Technically the route that Alex took was only a few miles shorter but those miles were at the extremes - the slowest portions of the trip. His exit point from Manhattan could save up to twenty minutes depending on traffic and the exit point at the end of Route 66/the Santa Monica pier was navigationally much more simple. I simply could not stomach the idea of using a non-Cannonball tribute route based on how the idea had developed for me.

  I sought to unify the two records by breaking both while adhering to the Cannonball route of starting at the Red Ball Parking Garage on E 31st Street, originally chosen because it was used to house the Car & Driver Magazine test fleet and to finish at the Portofino Inn in Redondo Beach which was now called the Portofino Hotel and Marina.