by Ed Bolian
It was an unreal sensation, one I had been entirely unprepared to experience. Getting the average over 90 mph had felt good. This felt euphoric. We had a shot. Now we just needed to not get arrested or break the car.
Our speeds were continuing to be about 10 mph slower during the day. It had nothing to do with testicular fortitude, fear of incarceration, or capability; it was traffic. There were just a lot of cars and trucks on the road. Each interaction with one was a time when we had to slow down. We had generally stopped caring how fast we passed people. If the lane was clear we did not slow down.
I had not been sure how we would get home. Since I had seriously felt that there was a great chance we would get through the midwest and pull out the white flag I had not made any prior arrangements. If we made it all the way to Redondo Beach, shipping the car home would be expensive, as would three last minute flights to Atlanta. We decided that if we broke the record, a treat to ourselves would be to ship the car home and fly. If we failed, we would have to endure two more days of each other's’ company in the confinement of the CL. At this point, as business oriented as the drive had been, our patience was worn fairly thin.
Dave had enlisted a friend to assist us at the last minute to lead us through New Mexico. Jules Doty drove a gorgeous white Porsche 964 and provided us some excellent insight as to what we could expect. Dave and Dan were feeding me great intel from the on board equipment and we were making excellent time. We had seen very few cops up to this point but there was a fairly intense window of police activity coming up. The spotter’s advice was “Ignore the cops on the left side of the road...it’s a drug bust...they won’t even notice you.”
As we drove past he was clearly right and the local police force seemed interested in seeing what the suspect’s car would look like with the interior completely removed. While it felt like we had generally blended in through the early part of the trip, I believe that our car and Jules’s Porsche were the only non-American cars in the state of New Mexico.
As we had gotten away from the more populated areas of Texas and New Mexico I had started to get a few chances to air out the car more aggressively. Earlier in the drive Dan and I had spent some time resetting the on board computer data and watching it calculate the fuel economy at 100, 110, 120, 130, 140, and 150. It got down to 11 on the higher end of that spectrum but we calculated that we could not go fast enough to get bad enough fuel economy for it to matter.
I was accelerating as hard as we had into clearings throughout the trip. The car’s five speed automatic is extremely robust, in fact it was the same one that made its way into the much more powerful Mercedes McLaren SLR between 2005 and 2009. It’s control unit interpreted the stronger throttle inputs as a request to downshift more readily, hold the gears longer and execute the shifts a bit more violently. It made Dan and Dave a bit nervous. They reminded me that even if it did not foil our fuel economy for the trip trying to spend that much time above 140 mph would not do us any good if the car did not get us there. I agreed to slow the acceleration and give the car some time to rest.
I drove 260 miles which got us into New Mexico. My leg took 2 hours 42 minutes at an average of 96.30 mph. We were finding some less populated areas of the southwest and were moving through at just over the pace required to avoid getting addicted to crystal meth. I gave up the reins near Encino, NM and Dave was ready to go.
He fatigued quickly. No one could blame him as we had been on the road for about 20 hours. We cut his trip short at about 210 miles in a completely mutual decision. The average for that leg was Dave’s slowest at 92.65, still phenomenal given the circumstance and higher than the average of any other cross country drive ever. Even with the sub 100 averages we were seeing in shorter shifts during the day, we were still carrying a moving average that was well over 100. It was a testament to how fast the first night had been.
The biggest symptom of Dave’s fatigue was not slowing down or dozing off - it was frustration. Every time a truck or another driver would pull out in front of our car Dave would respond with a torrent of expletives and a clearly confounding level of anger. I told him on several occasions that we would go faster for longer if he would relax. His response was always that he actually was relaxed but I begged to differ. Your mouth and brain cannot be that disconnected. It was a constant struggle but he began to improve over time. He completed his driving shift, Dan had dozed off in the back, and I took over. Dave was ready for some time to rest.
I do not enjoy the use of profanity. I feel that Jerry Seinfeld said it best when he said that “Profanity is a great shortcut of comedy and the reason I don’t use it is that I am concerned about the joke quality suffering.” I feel the same way about daily speech. If I can’t make my point using acceptable and un-ambiguous language then I feel the need to try again in my head. Deliberate and thoughtful speech also makes people seem like they are more confident in what they are doing. That serves me well professionally.
Dave’s reaction to a Buick Lesabre pulling out in front of him was not offensive to me in the least. It simply revealed to me that he was less composed in that moment at the helm of the Mercedes than I would have liked him to be. At that stage of the drive we were both much more fatigued than we let ourselves admit. Cues like this were worth noting because we needed to help each other relax and stay focused. It was easy to see times when that attention was wavering.
The I-40/Route 66 portion in New Mexico had been under construction for almost a decade. Jules had made a point of saying the construction was over and the people responsible seemed pretty excited about it as well. There were signs every few miles thanking the New Mexicans for their patience. It felt like the rainbow God sent to Noah saying, “I had to do that, sorry, but I won’t do it again.” Knowing how much it had held up Alex and Richard I was eternally grateful.
The “how are we getting away with this?” sensation had not faded. There must have been dozens of cops that had been alerted to this and were pursuing us in some way. It has to catch up with you eventually. We were scanning the air for planes or helicopters. There was no way to tell how many people were negatively aware of what we were doing. We had no real choice but to press on but things couldn’t keep going that well forever, right?
Rather than an intense and dramatic race from sea to shining sea this was turning into a fairly boring but quick drive by three people who shared some very strange connections prior to the trip. There were no high speed police chases, no hairy maneuvers, no near death experiences, and nothing that would have been very entertaining to watch if we had been getting it all on video. The drama was all in getting the car, the team, and our mindsets where they needed to be in New York. The rest had really been going down the Hot Wheels track. I had expected the outcome to be half based on the uncontrollable variables and half on us. The half that was us, I guessed was 30% based on preparation and 70% on execution. That was reversed and perhaps even more askew. I had done all that I could to get us to the starting line with a chance. It looked like that might be all that we needed on this unexpectedly glorious day.
It had seemed crazy to make a reservation at the Portofino before we left so I didn’t. There were simply too many obstacles between New York and Redondo Beach to justify a non-refundable hotel room. Riding through New Mexico we were less than 1000 miles out. It was time to make the call. I called them and booked two rooms for us. It did not sound like the hotel was highly trafficked that time of year.
I took over in Gallup, NM not knowing what I was in store for. Dave was exhausted enough that he stumbled badly getting out of the car. As we entered Arizona the Garmin ETA was 1 AM. That meant a speed limit average for the rest of the trip would have gotten us a 30 hour time. The evolution of the terrain was difficult to appreciate at speed but eerie when we realized how different the landscape was as we traveled along. One man’s vacation destination is another’s cross-country speeding obstacle.
America is a great country that offers a wide variety of landscapes.
There were plenty of small towns spread hundreds of miles from anything remotely interesting. I remember the feeling, “What has to go wrong in your life to end up living here? Surely they can’t all be in witness protection, right?” The diversity of our country is what makes it great. Strangely, it was the common interest among three very different people that was making this team function effectively.
The only area where we saw a lot of police activity, both fixed and moving, was just into Arizona. The Sanders - Chambers area felt like cop alley. Lots of quick decelerations stand out on the GPS data in that segment. Fortunately there was usually sufficient warning either from the countermeasure devices or from Dan’s laser Asian vision. The wide open desert left few opportunities for effective hiding spots. It appeared that these highway patrolmen were far more interested in finding vacationers creeping into the 90s or drug runners than cross country outlaw road racers.
One car really threw us. It seems like every car out West is an American truck or SUV. If you see a very clean, white, late model Tahoe though, you need to slow down. There was one up ahead and it had some stickers. I couldn’t see any lights but it was generally adhering to the speed limit, suspicious. Dan could tell that the tag was governmental but he couldn’t make out any of the other identifying characteristics.
A cop moving in the opposite direction is easy. A speed trap is generally detectable. Theoretically we had seven semi-redundant implements to warn us of those - Waze, Trapster, V1, Passport, Scanner, CB, Dan/Binoculars. The third possibility that is almost impossible to overcome is a cop in front of you moving in the same direction. The procedure is to leapfrog your way up to him by using the shade of other vehicles and curves to obstruct his line of sight until you are right behind him. Then you have to pass the cop at a very slight 2-3 mph differential while still less than 10 mph over the speed limit. This happened to us twice.
In the situation here, I was driving and the car up ahead turned out to be a Department of Homeland Security Tahoe. After that was discovered I passed him very quickly. He tried to keep up for a bit to see what was going on but that was not happening. I lost him quickly.
The second time was actually earlier in the drive. Dave was in Oklahoma and the cop that he happened upon was an Indian Reservation cop. Now in addition to smoking Peyote and taking twenty-five cents at a time from bus tours of senior citizens via shiny slot machines, native Americans get to police their own land. It is a bad place to get pulled over. You would have thought that I was asking Dave to sing karaoke to an audience of every girl that he had ever had a crush on. He could not have been less comfortable passing a police officer. I thought I was going to have to call 911 and report an accident behind us in the eastbound lane to get the dispatcher to get this guy to jump the median.
Fortunately, Dave eventually made it by him so I didn’t have to commit another crime that day.
The drive down from Flagstaff was the worst leg of the trip. I was driving straight into the sun. It should have been obvious that when you drive due West through an entire day you are going to have to spend some time driving straight into the setting sun. It should have also been foreseeable that when you drive 100 mph into the sun it actually prolongs the sunset you get to experience. I had not thought about it. It would not have changed the fact that we had to negotiate through the hazard but it would have been nice to mentally prepare for it. When racing drivers know that they will be looking into the sun at a certain point on each lap they place a piece of tape on the section of the windshield that obstructs their view of the sun. Supposedly it works wonders. I learned that after the fact from Charles. With our arsenal of every type of tape we had the means to deploy this solution.
The car was filthy but that hadn’t mattered until then. Every bug and speck of dirt on the windshield glared to make visibility impossible. Dave described it well. “It looked as if we had driven through an apocalyptic storm of locusts whose entrails were filled with super-glue.” When you hit a well-fed insect going 150 mph it leaves a streak of goo on your windshield more than a foot long. Washer fluid was no match for it and we were left to press on.
It was miserable. The dark voids in the blinding light were the trucks which couldn’t see either. I had on dark polarized sunglasses and I was wedging my head against the roof of the car to use the top of the windshield frame as a makeshift sun visor. I am too tall to use regular sun visors. They block the entire road from a vantage point already near the headliner of most cars. This was a part of the trip where in normal circumstances a driver would have pulled over, grabbed a bite to eat, and waited for the sun to set. We had to keep driving and we needed to keep going fast.
At one point I was approaching two large trucks, one behind the other. The back truck was a FedEx truck who decided to pass the front. I was approaching fast, around 135 mph. I flashed my lights at the trucker and braked hard for a few seconds before lifting to shift the car’s weight and restore the ability to steer. I honked my horn and ended up passing the truck with two of my tires off of the road in the left rocky median.
It was loud and startling to Dave and Dan but I was able to recover smoothly. The truck driver likely would not have been able to see in his mirror due to the contrast between looking forward and backwards in those light conditions. It was as close a call as we had. The only casualties of the off-road excursion were a shattered lower left fog light that the car still wears proudly and the dislodging of one of the four laser jamming heads. I honestly cannot believe we never broke the windshield.
The CB functionality had not improved. The Cobra 29 I bought was hugely adjustable and we were too inexperienced with it to really dial it in. I should have gone with a simple Radio Shack version like I had used previously. Idiot-proof was a salient attribute for our equipment to have.
We ended up only being able to hear occasional mumbled exclamations from the truckers that we passed. Most of what we did hear was their gurgled negative remarks about the silver Mercedes four wheeler that was going very fast. We did use the CB to get past some truckers. I would impersonate the truck on the left which was blocking us with a passing maneuver and ask the trucker on the right to tap his brakes so that I could come past. Then I would pretend to be the trucker on the right inviting the trucker on the left to come on over, telling him the coast was clear.
The safety discussion about the pursuance of this record remains unwinnable. There is, however, a surface level concern and then a deeper understanding of the safety implications that is more interesting to consider.
We drove across the country in less than a day and a half. Think about all of the drama that you have experienced in a car for the last three thousand miles, which on average in America is four to five months of driving. Think of the number of people texting, cutting you off, merging without looking, painting their toenails, crying for no apparent reason, eating, drinking, sleeping, reading, and doing everything except driving. We saw all of that ridiculousness in under two days.
Driving three thousand miles was more dangerous than the speed. We had one close call with the law and one with a truck but we made it safely because all three of us were wholly engaged in the task of driving. I maintain it is actually some of the safest feeling time I have spent behind the wheel. I don’t expect that to carry any weight with people who will find this offensive but I am not surprised in the least that this went off without incident.
It was fortunate that all three of us remained devoted to unapologetically policing each other for fatigue. We were ready to step up when anyone else needed a break. After the sunset I was in the mountains in Western Arizona. It was terribly curvy and I got pretty delirious. I was going as fast as I could but getting very tired. I remember seeing a set of tail lights ahead of me and feeling like it was impossible to catch them. My eyes simply could not acclimate from the intensity of the sunset earlier. I told Dan to find us the next gas station and to not stop talking to me until we got there.
This was our slowest section. I
recall the on board computer read about 95 mph for the leg. It normally read a little higher than was actually true, probably due to us resetting it if we had a slow stretch in order to boost our confidence. The actual pace from our tracking software was 89.43 mph for 237 miles.
This was our last gas stop. It was in Seligman, AZ. We had driven 2,390 miles in 24 hours and 24 minutes. That tank had only taken us 723 miles but with under 500 to go we were more than fine with an incomplete refuel. The stop took seven minutes and we were certainly not in our best form.
I remember looking at the distance to destination during that last leg and it being 650 miles. We had been driving for nearly an entire day and we felt like we were close but we still had a trip to Miami from Atlanta to go. It was disheartening but our pace was still strong. The overall average at that point had actually dropped down to 97.95 mph but it was getting dark and the roads were clearing up of other users. It was refreshing to know that we each only had one more driving stint, we did not have a chance to botch a refuel, and that it was finally dark.
We crossed the Arizona border in Needles. We had averaged 93.25 mph across Arizona, quite a feat given the month long feel of the last two hours of our lives. The context of average speeds on well prepared cross country drives was limited. With the fastest time ever in Cannonball competition, Dave Heinz & Dave Yarborough had averaged 86.9 mph onto a time of 32:51 in ‘79. David Diem and Doug Turner averaged 89.4 mph to achieve 32:07, the fastest time of the US Express competitions. The Rawlings/Collins Ferrari time in 2007 was 31:59 with an overall average of 87.9. Road improvements and route differences made the lower average and faster time possible. Alex Roy and Dave Maher had been the only pair to average over 90. Their 90.5 average had brought them in at just over 31 hours.
