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

by Ed Bolian

  We were not regretting our lack of a night vision system. I knew that some previous users were very proud of them but I had not been convinced that any of the available options would have permitted driving with the headlights off. None of them offered visibility beyond the headlights so it seemed like an expensive non-advantage. I also felt like if I was an unsuspecting Ohio-an and a Mercedes flew past me without its headlights on as I was headed to my bingo parlor, hair permanent salon, or Golden Corral family night, then I would be more upset than if the offender was using some illumination.

  Similarly, I never had an occasion to deactivate the rear lights. The vigilance of three people meant we generally identified all of the hazards prior to passing them so visibility of the rear lights was a non-issue. The main concern that we had at the time was not missing a cop but having someone call the cops. A car in a compromised state was more likely to trigger a strange 911 recording than a car simply speeding excessively.

  The duality of personality of the Mercedes AMG cars is probably the tallest feather in their caps. Even after nearly 100k miles of daily driving the cars over the years and scrutinizing the performance statistics in selecting the CL for the trip, I had no idea that it would perform with the unending ferocity the car had that night. We were tearing through the “course” with a mind blowing amount of speed.

  “Surely we can’t keep this up the whole time?” Dave said from behind the wheel. “Something has got to happen at some point, right?”

  “Yes, but I think we are building up time fast enough that we might be able to recover from something pretty significant.” Dan answered. I could see his mind moving. “Essentially, if we need a 90-95 average, we just need two minutes at 150 for every minute we are stopped. That would wash it out.”

  I was very proud of their newfound and already proficient Cannonballing skills. “Exactly, we just need to bank time where we can and continue to take advantage of these opportunities to go really fast. You are doing great Dave and it sounds like the course is clear.” Foot to the floor.

  Whatever groove can be found sustaining 130-140 mph speeds on a public road, we had it. The supportively ergonomic German seats were massaging away. The scanner and CB were quiet. The recently aligned car was carving a path through the generally deserted Ohio roads without a bit of trouble at all. Even Dan was amazed at how comfortable he was finding the space in the rear seat.

  If it were any other type of drive, the back seat of the CL was unpleasant but on that occasion he had it arranged as his own mission control. He had an iPad browsing the area on Google maps, checking for the best options for our next gas stop, shooting an occasional text to Megan or Lisa Black, and offering the type of positive reinforcement to Dave that he soaked up like a reptile basking on a warm rock in summer.

  Dave said, “Man, this feels incredible. It does seem like our luck can’t last for 30 plus hours though. I just really hope it doesn’t run out on this leg.”

  REMARKS

  From Dave Black, Co-Outlaw

  We slogged our way down 31st, passed the infamous intersection-of-misinformation, rolled down to the onramp to the Lincoln tunnel. We blasted through it, up onto I-95, and down to the exit at I-78 (the second blunder spot), merged on and then tore the fucking road up. My tactical directions (felt like it) were spot on, and Ed was setting an insane and somewhat scary pace through the light traffic. We got close to bumpers, cutting in the small gaps. I had a brief moment of “oh shit” during this time - the driving was the most aggressive I had seen during the trip. I was hoping this was just Ed trying to find his stride. I went back to calling tactics.

  The drizzle of rain came as we worked our way through the New Jersey suburbs where we had been earlier. Ed kept a strong pace. Wipers off because the speed beading the water was more effective.

  I kept my eye on the Garmins and on the car’s trip computer to watch the average increase. The fifteen minutes in Manhattan made it take a long time to get the average up. I was waiting for the magic number “93” - this would be the moving average that we needed to maintain to beat Alex Roy’s 31:04. Part of me believed that we’d slow down at that point, and even looked forward to slowing down. Once we reached 93 average, Ed kept pushing with speeds upwards of 130 mph. It felt really fast and a bit scary. Ed had the challenging task of snaking through the Alleghenies where we had fog and lots of sharp, blind curves. Whatever concerns I had before were gone now. He was kicking ass.

  The average kept rising to 103 before we stopped, peed, and switched positions. It was about 3 hours in and around the West Virginia border of Ohio. The driver change and pee break was a comforting experience for the fact that it was so fast, that I knew we could do many of them without even putting a dent in our time. I would never feel pressured to over-drive while fatigued.

  As I sped up, I realized that driving has about a 25 mph lower perception of speed than being the co-pilot.

  As we approached traffic or blind hills, we’d let off the gas and we’d cue each other to relax, and take a breath. We’d also use these moments to compliment each other’s driving. For some strange reason, the compliments had an almost physical effect - like I could feel various feel-good chemicals pumping into my veins. It was strange. Ed gave great compliments but, then again, he is a car salesman.

  Driving was easy and fun. I was in my happy place - behind the wheel, focused, and aware. The car was a dream to drive - solid, planted, smooth, comfortable seats with massagers. I tried to loosen my grip on the wheel, breathe and relax while apexing curves at 120 mph. My mantra was “smoooooooth.” Once I hit the flat plains of Ohio, I hammered down.

  Chapter 18

  Continued

  We had generally done a good job of identifying threats and strategically avoiding them. Generally. After the sufficiently high average I had managed through Pennsylvania, Dave was excited to take the helm. Chris was giving us great feedback through Ohio and we were breezing along I-70 at a phenomenal pace. I was on the lookout and Dan was keeping great tabs on all of the data coming into the car. The system, however recently contrived, was functioning well.

  Dave was driving through Ohio near the Eastern outskirts of Columbus. The setting was starting to become more urban. He was in an excellent groove reaching and maintaining some very high speeds. I saw a car sitting in the median. It looked like a mid sized American sedan. I immediately said, “Brakes, brakes, brakes!”

  “Oh yeah, I see the brake lights up there.” Dave replied. The other drivers ahead were just then noticing the cop.

  “No, Dave. There is a cop. Hit the brakes.” I was certain that we were going to be bailing him out of an Ohio jail a couple of hours later.

  He nailed them with all of the grace of a Floyd Mayweather domestic discussion. In fact, I think he warped the rotors. If not, that happened sometime soon after. He was traveling somewhere in the mid 130’s when I first spoke up and I saw that he passed the cop still doing 95.

  When we went by I could see the police officer looking into screen of the laptop mounted in his passenger seat, missing the spectacle of our sure-to-be glowing rotors just to his port side. I am not sure what he was looking at or what other work he was avoiding but that had been an extremely close call. We decided that “Cop” was a clear enough instruction. “Brakes” would be the understood response to such a command moving forward. I assume we owe a debt of gratitude to some newly updated pornographic web site for saving us there.

  The gut reaction when you narrowly avoid going to jail is to slow down. In this case you can’t do that. If you spend five minutes below 90 you need to spend ten above 100 to make up for the transgression. Dave shook it off well and got back on the throttle. Dan and I remained on high alert.

  Radar detectors are fairly rudimentary devices. The best one that I have ever used is the Valentine 1 system. It uses arrows to indicate which sensor (front or rear) is getting the signal. There are certain beep patterns that you learn. Low intensity K or X band bogeys can be immedi
ately dismissed as convenience store door sensors. An intensifying signal is moving towards you. Ka is usually a big deal and usually fixed.

  VASCAR or radar mounted to a moving police car usually shows up as a very strong K band signal. Sometimes, though, you will get a rhythmic blip of signal up ahead that appears every 5-10 seconds and quickly goes away. That can persist for miles. It means you are approaching a cop a good distance ahead, moving in the same direction. Cruising through Ohio we continued to get these. The driving protocol is to go as fast as you can to catch up and identify the threat while never cresting a hill or going around a blind turn without the ability to quickly brake down to within 10-15 miles per hour of the speed limit quickly and smoothly.

  Chris had not reported anything ahead of us but I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were about to blow past a cop coming onto his morning shift and trying to decide on Dunkin’ Donuts or Krispy Kreme for the morning freebie. I glanced back through the rear glass and I saw our second V1 mounted there. The sound had been turned off because it was visible to the driver and typically the noises were redundant. It was alternating with the windshield mounted one. They were tricking each other into thinking that the threat was there and reverberating within the car. I told Dan to turn it off and all went quiet. Frustrated with the oversight we accelerated hard to make up for 10-15 mins of taking it easy (not exceeding 100-110).

  Chris was also making some great time through Ohio. I was planning on having him hand the baton to David Wiggins near Columbus but he still had some ground on us and Wiggins was still at home with the flu so we continued on.

  The internet is full of clips of racing drivers doing mind blowing things in cars, stunt performers exercising car control that makes us all want to go to drifting school, and other displays of driving excellence. What Dave did in the early hours of that morning was something I had never envisioned. My afterthought of a co-driver knew so little about what we were actually doing that he wasn’t even worried about the consequences. He was going through the most dangerous state in the Union for speeders so fast I thought my head was going to explode.

  The police procedure changed once we got within twenty miles of Chris. f he were to come across a fixed speed trap he should pull over to the shoulder and ask the cop for directions. That way, he could be sure that the speed trap did not relocate between him passing it and us passing it. He could also distract the cop from noticing us as we breezed past with a quick, “Look, a squirrel!” Unfortunately, we never got to test that plan.

  It was 227 miles across Ohio on 70. Dave averaged 108.10 miles per hour.

  108! There is nothing else to say there. It was the single car street course Grand Prix of Ohio. Everything was working. Dave responded exceedingly well to both an invitation to competition and words of encouragement. I made sure to tell him when he made a smooth maneuver and to congratulate him on his great moments, of which there were many.

  It didn’t stop. It was 156 miles across Indiana on our route. He averaged an unthinkable 110.12 miles per hour. This brought our trip average up to 99.33 mph. The speeds were so great and so unrelenting that I honestly remember very little about the state. The periphery was a blur as the machine functioned perfectly.

  Things were going well. When you look at a map of the route that we took and you see the time spent in the Southwestern United States, it is easy to guess the speeds carried in Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona will be the most intense. That is not the case. The midwestern states are usually highly patrolled but are great opportunities to build speed. We did.

  It was upon noticing those averages when I realized that Danny Landoni, a guy I had never met in person and had only spoken to for about ten minutes prior to that night, had given me one of the most meaningful gifts I might ever receive. It was the key to this record. His comprehensive and encouraging reports of what lay ahead of us on that fateful night had been an invitation to drive as fast as I could everywhere we went. That driving challenged Dave into driving the way he had and thereby set the tone for the entire trip.

  Chapter 19

  Excessive Oil Consumption

  It was time for our first fuel stop. We were in Casey, Illinois - properly in the unremarkable middle of nowhere. We got out as high on adrenaline as we had ever been and admittedly it was a bit of a scramble. I gave Dan one of my credit cards to go to the far side pump and get it running while I negotiated the near side and got it into the auxiliary tanks. I think Dave had been supposed to remove the two caps on the rear tanks but the restroom became a higher priority. It did not matter to me in the slightest. He had earned it.

  It was not surgical but it was efficient. The credit cards worked, the gas flowed, nothing caught fire, and we were back on the road in nine not-entirely-frantic minutes. While it remained difficult to judge how fast a three man, three tank, multi credit card, three bladder, delirious early morning pit stop was supposed to take; we were happy with the effort and result.

  We made it 815 miles on approximately 64 gallons of gas. That was an average of 12.73 mpg. Going into the drive I had no idea how bad the fuel economy was going to get. Most of my short stints of high averages had been around 15 mpg but I knew that sustaining those speeds over these distances would be much worse. An average of ten or less would have required an extra fuel stop.

  This was far beyond what we would need. That meant there was no reason not to press the accelerator a bit harder, if that were even possible. As the possibility of breaking the record crept in, I thought about areas where someone could have gone faster. With rare exception, we had gone as fast as our fast car would go. We encountered traffic but dealt with it handily. Very little was being left on the table. It still had the feeling of opening a Scrabble game with three seven letter words, tripling each score. Sure, it is going well but that can’t possibly be sustained throughout the game.

  I make no apologies about being competitive. I was not content to be so bested by Dave in this circumstance so it was hammer down when I got in the car for my second driving shift leaving the gas station in Illinois. The plan was to have my younger brother, Jeremy, lead us through the Illinois section. He had moved there a couple of years prior for a job with a consulting firm in Evanston. As it so happened his wife was out of town with their gasoline powered car, leaving him with their second car - a free-to-lease-after-tax-break Nissan Leaf. In addition to being my brother, Jeremy is my carbon offset. His fully charged 89 mile range was not of great use to us that night so he offered only emotional support.

  Even without a spotter leading us, I was pressing hard. I was driving very fast but it was smooth and comfortable. We had elected to forgo considerable video during the trip. It had obviously been the focus of Alex Roy’s drive as he was planning the documentary with Cory Welles but I decided against it on three grounds.

  First - we did not need it as proof. We would have the traditional trifecta of toll receipts, gas receipts, and photos at the start and finish. We had cellular meta data for most of those photos, an evidentiary artifact unavailable just a few years prior. We had third party witnesses throughout the route and we had the easily digested third party tracking data. It also occurred to us that if were to be trying to fake the run, it would be easy for the employees of Waze, AT&T, or Trapster to check our accounts and find out we were lying.

  Second - the risk of being pulled over, arrested, and having the car impounded was extremely high. Having accessible documentation of how fast we had gone along with when and where that had happened would be an invitation to take turns serving jail sentences in each of the jurisdictions we had passed through. The existence of such evidence felt scary even if we retained the Fifth Amendment privilege of not incriminating ourselves.

  Third, I didn’t want anyone trying to look good, spend time and energy telling a camera what was going on, and doing anything other than devoting attention to the road. When Lee and I had spent the 2004 New York to Los Angeles drive filming for MTV, that was the game. That was where o
ur minds were. Get this shot, check the tape, is the sound working well, do you think they got that, oh there’s the helicopter - do something crazy! It was too much. It was a distraction we did not need with this drive’s intensity already turned up to eleven. We have a good number of short phone videos we can mince together into a bit of a highlight reel but I felt that was all that would be necessary.

  I was going fast. The first 85 miles of my leg went by in just 44 minutes. That is a 115.91 average. It was our fastest leg of the trip. We were impressed with each other and pleased that we were demonstrating ourselves to be the caliber of drivers to be competitive in this hallowed space. While we were up for it though, the car began to struggle.

  We were a little over nine hours into the trip. Just after 6 AM local Central time, 7 AM Eastern. The car gave me an alert to add oil at the next fuel stop. Of course the car did not know that the next fuel stop was 700 of the hardest miles of its life away. I had driven cars with this 5.4 liter supercharged V8 over 50,000 miles in the course of the previous six years. I had never had one burn a drop of oil. This one was at the point of begging for some which must have meant that we were two or three liters low. I had only packed two.

  We had kept the car running through the first fuel stop. The intention was to keep the engine and ignition on until we pulled into the parking lot of the Portofino the next day. The purpose of this was to keep the Mercedes on-board computer calculating as an additional form of verification. The tracking device was our end-all-be-all of evidence but it was very challenging to read due to the quantity of data it would record. It was useful in service as solid proof but the more photographable screens made for more compelling articles. The navigation system trip calculations and the on board computers would tell the story in a quick and digestible way.