Coast to Coast in 24 Hours - a NEW RECORD!

merry christmas from all of us here at vinwicki today we have a very special story about something that happened two years ago on christmas day and we've waited to release it because two of the storytellers had some other record-setting drives in mind which obviously they've done by now and so today we have the story of doug and arnie's first drive together this happened before their 27 25 run that beat my cannonball record back in 2019 before all the new coveted records before the e63 got destroyed and obviously before their most recent drive across the country in 2539 but this is the story of their southern route record from jacksonville to san diego kind of the trial run to see how the car worked and how they worked together before their goal of setting the cannonball record and so again it happened two years ago in 2018 and it started right here at my house and so this is the story of how they drove across the country in just 24 hours so what i looked to was to be the fastest person to ever cross the country from the atlantic to the pacific the transcontinental route southern trail old spanish trail as it's known is the shortest distance between the atlantic and pacific from jacksonville beach to dog beach in san diego 2365 miles which spans most of i-10 and runs through texas really close to the mexican border and is the southernmost route in the country so the original plan was going to be me and forest and we needed a third driver so i enlisted doug from switch cars the mexican stig to be our third driver my name is doug and i'm addicted to speed and after doing my first cannonball i wanted something more i wanted to have a real record not a consolation record and i had thought about doing the southern run and i had befriended arnie in the process of all this stuff and we started talking about 24 hours across the country and he and i had both done the same math and i decided that it was far wiser to try to convince him that i needed to be on his team rather than try to compete against him because he is a formidable force when it comes to cannonballing he brought me up to the a team so to speak and in in my opinion cannonballing is kind of like boating the best type of cannonball card to have is somebody else's so the plan was to meet at ed's house just before christmas and kind of stage the car and get everything ready with just a five hour jaunt down to jacksonville to the start the day before the run forest had been kind of feeling under the weather but was thinking he'd be feeling better and was going to make it and 24 hours before we're supposed to leave for jacksonville forest says that he's not going to be able to make it so i'm at dinner at ed's house you never know what's going to happen when you go to dinner at ed's house originally i'd gone there to just you know have dinner and wish these guys well they're going on on a spanish trail run well it turns out one of the drivers called in sick and they needed a third because this type of run is you need three people it's really intense it was a day before christmas and i'm with my wife and we got all these dinner plans for tomorrow christmas day and when these guys said they were gonna do it i'm like yeah i'm in and i said well i gotta ask the wife first come on am i in she's cool she said yeah go for it to me the my favorite part of cannonballing is actually building the car you know picking the perfect vehicle something that's fast comfortable and kind of under the radar so what i chose being the former vice president of ams i chose a 2015 mercedes e63 amg and fitted it with the alpha 9 package so it was great that arnie was building this amazing ideal car for this event and i could just be like yeah you should uh add this you know electronic air horn or add that feature and you know i just got to to be the beneficiary of all that so the e63 that i found was silver and was highly optioned with a carbon fiber package the red amg brakes that everybody wants and none of that was going to do because i wanted to dumb this car down to make it look very unassuming so i wrapped all the carbon in silver vinyl i painted the red amg calipers that everybody wants in gray i coated the factory black sport wheels that everybody wants in silver and then to top it all off i covered up a lot of the tail lights with silver vinyl which i ended up making a car that sort of looked like a mid-2000s accord from the back which looked honestly terrible but it ended up being a really good disguise for the car they picked me up on the freeway and check this out i even got a t-shirt from the event which is more than most folks get for cannonball that's how i met him on the freeway they picked me up near my house and we took off and went to florida we got a late start we lost five or six minutes getting started so the plan for this drive was to have doug do the first stint so with little traffic to contend with doug skillfully got the average speed to 100 miles an hour then 110 then 115 and he had gotten it all the way up to 119 miles an hour in the first two hours arnie had been told that christmas was the best day for doing this and all of our research seemed to confirm this that there would be the least amount of cops and the least amount of traffic complete crap as doug passed a underpass there was a florida state patrol up at the top of the on-ramp lights off and blasted us with ka band from behind doug slammed on the brakes as hard as he could to get the car settled down and knock off as much speed as he could but we knew we're in trouble so i pull over and he comes up and there was no opportunity for uh do you know how fast you were going 65 there was none of that it was just you know license and registration so i hand them my license with my fop card and given some of the other accoutrement on the car he goes you cop in ohio i was like no i just have a lot of friends so he asked me why i was going so fast and i just said oh you know it's a nice clear night open road you know don't see a need to to go any slower and he goes well what if a deer jumps out in front of you so i just pointed to the thermal screen and said oh we got that was that going to stop a deer from jumping out i go no but it'll help us to see it which is actually good because i was worried he was going to start asking about all this stuff and i would have to explain it but this gave me a great opportunity to just be like yeah got you on that one what do you got next so he goes well just uh give me a minute i'll be back and have you guys out of here so he let us go 14 minutes later with a ticket for a ledge speed of 117 in a 70 mile an hour zone so 47 miles an hour over on my first one so after doug's ticket he drove about another 10 miles and obviously didn't want to drive very fast in florida anymore so i kind of took over the wheel we had our average speed had dwindled from 118 miles an hour down to 103 overall so in my stint i slowly worked it back up nearing 110 and as we came into louisiana we got a nice long stretch on a bridge where there's no traffic coming at us nothing coming up ahead of us and i ran the thing up to 191 miles an hour probably could have hit 200 but i thought better keep it safe now a friend of mine was texting me because he was watching our progress on glimpse and shortly before the cop nailed me at alleged 117 he texts me and goes oh just check the glimpse saw you at 117. that was the exact speed the cop got me at and then he texts me and goes oh man welcome to louisiana it's all straight flat you know no on ramps this and that you can fly and we get thick fog i mean i cannot see past our low beams so i was like dude stop texting me you're you're cursing me every time arnie he is the man on binoculars at night he spotted this guy like a mile and a half away at night the guy had no lights on no reflective anything but he goes i think there's a cop up there so i slowed down and the problem with that car though it was so good at speed that i'd scrub off like 25 miles an hour thinking i'm going 75 and i was still going 90 and arnie would be like slow down you're you're still speeding and so i wouldn't look at my speedometer and he'd have to keep yelling at me to get slowed down so i wouldn't get a normal person ticket doug had been pretty careful to slow down past overpasses since his ticket but as the morning progressed in texas he started to get a little more careless and lo and behold we got blasted with ka band from yet another on-ramp so he pulls me over and of course i'm curious what he actually got us for because i was on my brakes but i knew it wasn't good and this time he got me at an alleged 116 so wasn't able to beat my previous record but still an unfortunate ticket and he wasn't quite as understanding as the previous gentleman but let us get away with a ticket and took 12 minutes of our time so i'm not sure which was more detrimental to the run as we rode along simpson who had really not planned to drive because he really didn't have experience driving something so fast he kind of decided you know i'd like to give this a shot but he told me that you know i really don't want to drive quite as fast as you and doug but we're willing to give him a shot shortly after i had the farthest spot probably in history i was on the binoculars and i spotted a cop's lights probably four miles out i mean it was so far out that it was another two miles i think before either of them could even see it with the naked eye so i was riding high on my spotting ability and i put the binoculars down shortly after that for a couple seconds to say something to arnie or make a joke or whatever and then i'm looking in the oncoming lane i see a white hood i'm like dave you should probably back it off a little bit i think that's uh radar lights up yeah i got pulled over once when i was driving in um in texas man i don't want to say anything disparaging about this cop because man you know i'm a cop supporter same guy gave me the ticket might save my wife's life tomorrow you know take a bullet for her but the dude pulled us over i was going i don't know i was going pretty good but um doug spotted the cop just in time he had instant on i got slowed down a little bit and i was only going a few miles over the speed limit just barely speeding he let me go because i accidentally instead of my driver's license gave him my uh veteran my va card well first off if if you i guess we're all going 3b in this video you see those guys they're clean cut they're professional looking i'm looking like a rag bag and the cop asked me you know how fast you were going you know like they normally do and i just played it off like dude this is this car is amazing man have you ever been in a car like this it's my buddy's car you know he's letting me drive it and how fast was that going are you sure i was going that fast and i'm looking over from the passenger seat with him talking about how he's he's not used to this fancy fancy man's car and you know not sure how fast sue's going and i'm just trying not to laugh because i'm like this is the biggest load of bs ever but he can pull it off he just let me go he goes uh yeah he gave me a warning for i think 97 miles an hour or something like say doug spotted him just in time to get me slowed down that was the easy part of it after making it through el paso texas and into new mexico we ran into what's called the truckers christmas we started to see a lot of truckers out on the road which i wasn't expecting and simpson being a former trucker let us know on this little phenomenon that a lot of truckers would have christmas morning off to be with their family but would have to be seven eight hundred miles away by christmas evening the scanner started to get really busy too and i kind of figured why there were so many cops on the road is because there was constant calls in for erratic drivers and drunk drivers and all sorts of like really erratic drivers and i heard multiple times on the scanner of people going excessively fast and kept thinking it was us but it was somebody 20 miles back or 20 miles ahead or whatever so there was obviously a lot of just shenanigans happening fueled by christmas spirits as we entered arizona the traffic kept multiplying and now it was raining in tucson and phoenix further slowing us down and the hopes of getting in within 24 hours or less were starting to dwindle i couldn't go above 100 miles an hour i just wasn't comfortable doing it faster than that because i knew the roads were potentially slick i just kept it at 100 because i'm like i can't lose time but i know it's not safe to try to make up time and hopefully arnie can do his thing on the last stint with just 250 miles to go i jumped in the driver's seat for the last stint of the trip and it's not smooth sailing you've got a border checkpoint you got to descend the mountains and get into san diego and get through there i'm texting ed back and forth from the passenger seat and he's like come on you guys got to push it guys got to push it you can still do this and i'm losing confidence that we're going to make it but i kept pushing arnie and i i said to him once i go hey like you have to drive faster i'm like i know there's cops and stuff out but we're either gonna not make 24 for one of two reasons either because you drive fast and you get yanked or because you didn't drive fast enough and i'm like which reason do you want it to be and we were going at a really good clip and about an hour out of san diego doug unbeknownst to me actually stopped spotting the potential police threats ahead not wanting to slow me down he could tell that i was just on a mission to get this done or go down trying something just happened and arnie got a bug up his butt and just turned it on and it was fantastic because number one i trusted his driving ability so i was completely confident i was like all right if it's gonna happen he's gonna make it happen i just basically put the binoculars down and stopped looking for cops because i knew i probably couldn't see him anyway and i just had to let him do his thing we're either gonna get tagged or we're not gonna make it if i call anything out or have him slow down then it's just gonna blow his confidence and we're not gonna make it so i just sat in the passenger seat quietly and enjoyed the ride and it was a crazy ride in in between packs of cars i would just hammer up into the next pack slow down to pass them and then just hammer up to the next one really without regard to possible police that i might be coming up on or not and there was one spot where i was going in a relatively good clip in between packs of cars and we got a ka blast and i got the thing slowed down to the speed limit just in time to for to have a california highway patrol passed by and this happened a couple more times that somehow by the grace of god i did not get a ticket as we got closer we were 15 minutes out and i still had 22 miles to go and it was looking like it was just going to be impossible but somehow in between packs of cars i was able to just weave my way in without affecting anybody without cutting anyone off i was able to smoothly get us down to the last stoplight right before dog beach so with just two minutes until the 24 hour mark i came to the stoplight and there was one car in front of me thankfully nobody was around and there was just enough room to get by this car so well i just made my way around him and we skidded to a stop at dog beach at exactly 24 hours and 54 seconds this was a pretty cool record to break because it's not just going faster than the next guy it's being the first guys i mean the very first guys to ever drive across this great nation of ours in one day when we did it in 24 hours it was just ocean ocean by car one day not only is it the fastest time across country ever which just makes it easy to talk about because you know there's all these well i was the fastest classic car i was as fast as this fastest in this race whatever no it's just we're the fastest people to cross the country in a car period in history and also between my two tickets we averaged i calculated it out by the time in the the mile marker we averaged 101.6 miles an hour between one ticket and the other so so brock yates the founder of cannonball had always said that 30 hours was the wall so i set out to find out what the wall was for the atlantic to pacific transcontinental record that was an amazing thing to witness live two years ago on christmas day so again merry christmas from all of us and i hope that you and yours have a wonderful day thank you so much to auto tempest for sponsoring this month of in wiki car stories and for their help presenting the car trek christmas special series which ends today on tavares's channel at noon eastern so please check that out i hope that you've enjoyed it so far we certainly had a lot of fun making it but be sure to go to autotempest.com using the link in the description below to thank them for their continued support of vinwicki and car trek and to find your next dream car whether it's a cannonball car or a car that you just want to drive to work every day it's the fastest and most powerful way to find it they allow you to search all the major listing sites at once that's why their motto is autotempest.com all the cars once served

Channel: VINwiki

Views: 504,841

Rating: 4.9348974 out of 5

Keywords: vinwiki, car stories, cannonball run, arne toman, doug tabbutt, david simpson, zombie road, mercedes, e63, record, the 2904, c2c express, jacksonville, florida, san diego, california, countermeasures, coast to coast, cross country, road trip, ticket, speeding, warning, FOP, cannonball memorial run, ed bolian, christmas

Id: e3jbtz3vt-A

Length: 19min 4sec (1144 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 25 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/DarkMatter00111]

Most detectors will give only you 2-3 miles at best for KA, but going so fast as the video shows the detectors become rather useless and just tells you you're going to get a ticket.

[u/moonwoolf35]

Am I a dick head for thinking that these constant runs they do are irresponsible as hell and overall stupid?