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

by Ed Bolian

  He had impressed himself in some ways he was clearly not anticipating. As someone who keeps a very fluid life direction, I could see Dave trying to see how much he wanted this drive to be his personal brand. As we flew home he was uncontainably curious about what the next week would look like.

  The five hour flight was an interesting opportunity to debrief. Dave was desperately trying to think of any strategies that would have improved the time. I could not tell if this was purely academic or if the next weekend he wanted to be back in New York at the starting line. The part of the conversation I think I enjoyed the most was the explanation of what the odds were that anyone ever got that same chance to get the right combination of positive outcomes to each of the variables that could have foiled the trip. Could the Cannonball Slot Machine ever throw all 7’s again? That served as a supplementary rationale to explain why I was so happy.

  It also probably helped explain why I looked like I could not have been more relaxed if I had just spent a week getting twice daily massages in Bora Bora. If my blood pressure and pulse were any lower on that flight home I would not have been able to open my eyes. It was the level of relaxation where you can actually hear your occasional heartbeat and feel your skin start to warm up rhythmically because the blood isn’t moving very quickly through your veins. It feels awesome.

  Since it was a complete toss up as to whether or not the public reaction would be positive or negative, we agreed that I would be the initial face of the story. Dave and Dan still wanted to be able to pass the Google-your-name portion of a job interview and so they were very pleased not to be in the proverbial driver’s seat for the next steps in the process.

  I emailed Richard Rawlings and spoke with he and Dennis Collins about our time a few days after we got back. They were both excited at the prospect of such a time but very skeptical. They were very pleased that we had adhered to the most traditional Cannonball start and end points. Richard seemed incapable of wrapping his head around the idea of our time with us only achieving a 158 mph top speed. He had always been quick to say that they had reached 207 mph (nine miles per hour faster than the manufacturer stated top speed of a 1999 Ferrari 550 Maranello) on several occasions during their drive.

  At the time they were headed to Jupiter, FL to film with Burt Reynolds for Fast and Loud. He later told me that they had discussed my time and that Burt had passed along words of congratulations. It is tough to get much cooler than that.

  I called Brock Yates Jr. who now organizes the Cannonball One Lap of America event that his father started in the 1980’s. I told him how much I thought of his father and how fondly I remembered the conversation I had with him nearly a decade prior. I told him that we had broken the record and our goal in all of this was to pay tribute to the legacy of Cannonball and the chapter of American automotive history it represented. Brock had Alzheimer's and did not remember anything about Cannonball but I told his son I wanted to find a chance to visit his father and stepmother (Pam) at some point soon to pay tribute to the man who had motivated me for the last ten years to accomplish this ridiculous dream.

  I got back in touch with Doug Demuro, who was starting to do the majority of his journalistic writing for Jalopnik - an online car blog that had broken the story of Alex Roy breaking the record in 2007. Doug wrote and released the story on the Wednesday before Halloween. They spoke with an unnamed employee of the tracking company (in fact, the CEO) to confirm the accuracy of the tracking data. The Jalopnik editorial staff contacted Waze as well to corroborate our claims. They refused to release their files but quietly re-inforced the data. The article went viral quickly. I was told it was the most read article ever on their site.

  The story was on every major network, it was the most clicked on article on CNN.com for a 24-hour period on Friday, November 1st. There were more than 500 television mentions, over 1,000 articles, countless blog and forum discussions, radio interviews, magazine remarks, etc. This drive I thought might barely matter to the American car enthusiast community became a shot heard round the world.

  My pursuance of this stood in stark contrast to that of Yates and the original Cannonballers of the 1970s. On one hand, the similarities are awesome, but in reality the spirit could not have been much more different. They were mad that people were saying that they couldn’t do something. They were making a case for a higher level driving license for qualified drivers and challenging a new establishment. It was a protest of an idea and it was designed to show that speed limits were unnecessary and that highway patrol agencies were inadequate.

  Our goal was not that at all. I do not believe that speed limits should be abolished. I think that the metrics of success are off but I think that they do a good job. Our drivers education programs, licensing requirements, and general driving protocols are nowhere close to where they would need to be in order to have higher or no speed limits.

  If you want to raise speed limits this is how you do it. You start by placing the penalties on activities that are truly dangerous. Institute $5,000 mandatory and uninsurable fines for the following - at fault accidents, DUI, texting, using the phone, and running red lights. Fines go to fund a full scale performance driving education system that can be privatized. Road and written tests must be conducted every five years. A license is immediately suspended at each offense until paid. Get three fines in one year and license is suspended for the next twelve months. Raise speed limits on controlled access highways 5 mph per year. There is zero cost of implementation and no loss in revenue for government. Police officers could never justify spending time writing $250 speeding tickets if they could be chasing $5,000 texting fish. It would not make driving a rich man’s game. It would make it critical for people in no position to afford a five grand fine to be careful and follow the rules.

  It would cut down on road users and create a huge demand for quality public transport. Government could step in to fill that void. This also has the added political benefit of being unobjectionable. No one can say that it is a bad idea to penalize people for causing accidents and drinking or texting while driving. Perhaps if I were not completely unelectable by the Google criteria as a politician now I could run for Senate and make that my platform.

  Can I still be arrested for this? The statutes of limitation have expired everywhere but Texas and Oklahoma which continue to roll whenever I am in each state. In that first year window it would have been difficult but not impossible for a police officer to develop probable cause to get a warrant to arrest me or Dave and to open an investigation. They would need to show proof of which of us was driving in their jurisdiction and rather precisely where we sped. This could be as easy as referencing traffic camera footage or but we have not had any issues. Most cops are car guys and as long as you do not try to rub their noses in your speeding exploits, they tend to be fairly good sports after a safe outcome.

  A crime stoppers organization sent out a lot of emails to local Georgia police precincts imploring them to find a way to arrest me. The blast included a very un-hateable picture of me with Megan from my Facebook profile. There were some internet petitions circulating encouraging various states that we drove through to find and arrest us. None received many signatures. The story was shared on Facebook more than 25,000 times from the CNN article as well as a similar number on the Jalopnik site. The CNN article had over 5,000 comments posted. CNN Television named my trip the “Best Commute of 2013.”

  Interestingly, I have not been contacted by anyone saying that they are seriously working on a plan to break my record. I do get asked often if I have any interest in breaking my own record. Certainly not until someone breaks it but if I am honest with myself, if I had ten attempts and $250k to throw at it, I doubt I would have all of the uncontrollable factors align to even make it possible to break the record. Once you start adding up the theoretical probabilities of the slot machine variables - of having no bad weather, no construction projects, no accidents that cause traffic jams, light rush hours where unavoidable, a full-ish mo
on for visibility, no issues with the car, not hitting any animals crossing the road, being able to coordinate with a team, and generally being psychologically ready to do so; it starts to get asymptotically close to impossible to recreate.

  A few months following the record, I was talking to Richard Doherty. He organized the 1980-1983 US Express events after participating in Cannonball and being disappointed in the publicity circus of 1979 and the discontinuation of the event. The stories from these guys never get old to me. I don’t think his head lifted off of his pillow in the decades following their last 1983 running where he didn’t hope someone would call inviting him on another cross country race. I told him how in every conversation I had with someone who had done this type of drive, they all offered “well, if this hadn’t happened...” scenarios where they would have gone faster. I felt like the only person to have felt like I could not go any faster. Everything that went right surely could not all go so well again.

  Many commenters and friends have offered various solutions on how to improve the time. As I contemplate the possible improvements that I could have made to lower my time, this is what I have come up with:

  ●Pay for fuel in cash (eliminates credit card issues). Race car dump cans, fuel trucks on the side of the road or alongside the car while moving on the highway, etc. are overkill. The advantage is not worth the risks. Fuel volume on our trip was perfect. No need for more. We did need a fuel additive to cope with poor quality gas in the Western US. I had planned to take some but forgot.

  ●Have friends at each gas stop to help pump, clean the windshield, and manage logistics.

  ●We used Waze on an iPhone. It is better to use it on a 3G/4G tablet.

  ●A faster car - a Bentley Continental GT Supersports 2+2 ($100-130k current value) would be the best option. This would make occasional 180 mph stints possible without losing handling ability.

  ●Lead cars out of Manhattan to block intersections (Rawlings/Collins did this)

  ●Working CB and Scanner

  ●Slightly overfill the car with oil to begin the drive.

  ●At this point you can probably scrap the spare tire and jack. The time to replace it would probably make it nearly impossible to break the record and the extra space will make the drive more comfortable. At the very least, move it to a completely out of the way location.

  ●Stabilize or mount the binoculars so that people other than Dan can use them.

  ●Find some way to apologize to the people who you pass. This could be a scrolling LCD sign along the back of the car.

  ●A cleaner dash would decrease stress.

  ●Deploy more scout cars throughout the country.

  Each of these ideas would save 1-5 mins overall. Combined they are not enough to overcome issues with any one of the variables that we had favorable outcomes with. A storm, traffic jam, accident, car issue, or ticket would likely end any chance of improving on our time.

  During an interview that I did on CNN, the hosts asked what I would do next. The hosts at the Today Show in New York were similarly interested in what happens to someone after they spend a day and a half breaking just about every traffic law in the country. I answered that according to my wife, my next adventure to look forward to was having children. The ticking clock that was not mounted with double stick tape to the dashboard of the Mercedes had not slowed its tempo. We got pregnant the next month and found out on January 1, 2014. Graham Edward Bolian was born at 3:12 on August 20, 2014. He was 7 lbs 4 ounces, 20.5 inches long.

  In the aftermath of the record announcement, I came to find out that our one-off time trial style drives were not the only modern interpretation of the Cannonball legacy. Immediately following the announcement of the Roy/Maher/Welles record, a man from San Francisco named John Ficarra had an idea. He was disgusted by the money-no-object approach at the record pursuit and was enamored by the recently launched 24 hours of Lemons racing series (endurance track racing in $500 cars). He decided it would be interesting to blend the two and The 2904 was formed.

  This is a longer story for another day but after our drive, Ficarra contacted me. He said that they had run the event six times and if they were going to do it again, they wanted to spice it up a bit. The premise was that each team could spend no more than $2,904 which was representative of the mileage of their original New York to San Francisco route. They had also done the event from New York to Los Angeles. Like Lemons rules, safety related items were not counted in the budget. He said that if I were interested in joining their merry event, it might do just that.

  I told him that I would love to do it and experience the drive in a bit of a different way. It also offered me the chance to continue exploring different solutions to this problem I had been kicking around for my entire adult life. I purchased a 12 owner, 2 accident, salvage title, airbags previously deployed, frame damaged and repaired, 8 shades of white and yellow 2002 Mercedes S55 AMG on Craigslist Las Vegas for $1,500. The woman selling it had lent it to her daughter to drive to Hollywood to become a famous movie star. The car had broken down and she had never become famous. The driver’s window was stuck down, the suspension was collapsed, the gauges didn’t work, and the mileage was unknown.

  I bought the car and had it shipped home. Dave “Klink,” Chris Staschiak, and I drove the car among a field of eleven cars to win the 2015 running of the event with a time of 32 hours 5 minutes, making it the fastest time ever in a competitive New York to Los Angeles style event. This was not the only Cannonball related news story of 2015, however.

  2015 marked an unexpected renaissance in the notion of competitive cross country driving. It seemed to have been fueled by the popularity of the news story about our run but it was an explosion of creative interpretation around the same idea. During the year, there were twelve new “Cannonball” related records claimed. They were:

  ●Solo Atlantic to Pacific Record – David Simpson – 27 hours 49 mins

  ●Atlantic to Pacific Record – Vic Echeverria, Bill Farmer – 26 hours 19 mins

  ●Shortest EV Charge Time NY to LA (Guinness officiated) – Carl Reese, Deena Mastracci, Rodney Hawk – 12 hours, 48 mins

  ●EV NY to LA Record – Carl Reese, Alex Roy, Deena Mastracci – 57 hours, 48 mins

  ●Autonomous Car NY to LA – Carl Reese, Alex Roy, Deena Mastracci – 57 hours, 48 mins

  ●Motorcycle NY to LA Record – Carl Reese – 38 hours 49 mins

  ●3 Wheeled LA to NY Record – Alex Roy & Zach Bowman – 41 hours 49 mins

  ●EV Coast to Coast to Coast Record – Carl Reese, Deena Mastracci – 6 Days 6 hours 22 minutes

  ●Coast to Coast to Coast Record – Pierce Plam, John Ficarra, Alex Richter – 5 days 10 hours 49 mins

  ●Solo NY to LA Record – David Simpson – 34 hours 33 mins

  ●Competitive Event NY to LA Record – Ed Bolian, Chris Staschiak, Dave Klink – 32 hours 5 mins

  ●John Ficarra set a record of having participated in 7 competitive Cannonball-style events

  It was an amazing year to be associated with this craft. Also, there was a spinoff of a spinoff created. Paying tribute to The 2904, which itself paid tribute to the Cannonball Baker; some New Zealanders created an event called the C2C Express. In addition to limiting the purchase budget at a round $3,000, all participating cars had to be built prior to 1980. I was asked to participate in the second running of this in September 2016 along with fellow 2904 competitor Arne Toman and Forrest Sibley. We dressed as the Blues Brothers and drove a 1974 Dodge Monaco Bluesmobile to a winning time of 34 hours 17 minutes.

  2016 was also an extremely sad time for the Cannonball community. Early in the year, Richard Doherty passed away. In October, we lost Brock Yates. I had the honor of penning an obituary for my late hero for Jalopnik and it brought back all of the emotion that this chapter of my life had involved. The outpouring of love and admiration from the motorsport community was plentiful and well deserved.

  I continue to receive calls of congr
atulations and camaraderie from various past Cannonballers, US Express guys, and even heard of other small events of this kind that have happened over the past few decades. It is an interesting fraternity of lunatics to currently be in charge of but it has been a very fun ride.

  EPILOGUE

  Now Go Find Yours!

  The takeaway from this experience is simply how awesome God can allow our time on this planet to be. It is a story of an inspiration, identity, and a very unique challenge. Cross country record breaking will never be a mainstream goal or activity and it should not be. I want this story to serve as an illustration that there is probably an out of the box idea out there that can become your Cannonball record.

  I am the luckiest guy in the world. Not for winning, not for surviving, and not for avoiding jail. At a very young age I found that “thing.” I found a challenge that could preoccupy my consciousness, both demand and justify an endless string of sacrifices and incremental commitments, become an obsession, and be an intense source of pride in achievement. Through the arc of my engagement with the challenge it went from an interest, to an idea, to a goal, to a challenge, to a lifestyle, to an obsession, to something that I would do almost anything to achieve. The transformative arc revealed more about myself than it did about driving.

  It was at the preparatory moment when I knew nothing was off the negotiation table when I knew I had found it. It existed in the intersection between my interests, abilities, and self image. There was nothing that could tick more resonating boxes for me.

  The drive appealed to my passions, edified the image of myself I wanted the world to see, demonstrated the attributes about me I am most fond of, and helped me come to grips with the flaws within me. The Cannonball Record could hardly have been a more obscure dream but I truly believe there was nothing else on Earth that I could have accomplished that would have made me this content.