The Pedal-to-the-Metal, Totally Illegal, Cross-Country Sprint for Glory is “feloniously stupid” — and pretty cool, at least to your inner 14-year-old:
Most people remember The Cannonball Run as a campy ’80s road comedy featuring, among others, Roger Moore, Dom DeLuise, and Farrah Fawcett. But to gearheads, the Cannonball Run is the original outlaw cross-country road race, organized by legendary Car and Driver writer Brock Yates. Entrants drove everything from cheap beaters to high-priced tweakers, but all had an appetite for white lines, black tar, and speed.Officially known as the Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash (and later as the US Express race) the race set the standard for outlaw driving. This was uniquely American car culture — free and fun and fast. And nobody was faster than Diem and Turner, who hammered their 308 Ferrari from a garage on Manhattan’s Upper East Side to Newport Beach, California, in an unthinkable 32 hours and 7 minutes.
According to Yates and his fellow Cannonballers, trying to beat that record today is pointless. Their argument goes something like this: Cannonball records were set back when the free-wheelin’ ’70s hooked up with the greed-is-good ’80s for fat lines of cocaine and unprotected sex. But these, brother, are Patriot Act days — executive-privilege end times in which no rogue deed goes untracked, no E-ZPass unlogged, no roaming cell phone unmonitored by perihelion satellite. Big Brother is definitely watching. Big Speed, the old Cannonballers say, is a quaint, 20th-century idea, like pay phones or print magazines.
But nobody had telexed Roy or his new filmmaker pal, Welles, the memo on this one. Once again, Roy put his formula in motion. First, he planned for weeks. Then, with his high school friend Jon Goodrich as copilot and cameraman James Petersmeyer tucked in the backseat, Roy left Manhattan’s Classic Car Club on December 16, 2005, and drove west, fast. They arrived at the Santa Monica Pier in California bleary-eyed, exhausted, and frightened — and two hours and 39 minutes shy of the record.