I Broke The Coast-to-Coast Record In a Truck!

[Music] so how I got into cannonballing with a GMC pickup truck is a really unique one because like a lot of people I started out as just a fan enjoyed watching the videos you know knew about the Cannonball movie kind of knew the story learned more about it on the vinwiki channel and like a lot of people really saw that the fast times that people like Doug and Arie were putting up were just completely out there right but knew it was something kind of Out Of Reach for someone like me until I saw David Simpson's video about the Old Spanish Trail Run that he did and he had done it solo and I think I made the mistake that a lot of people that watch Cannonball content they'll see the average speeds and it doesn't seem like it's that fast but you kind of start to go down that path and I would read the comments on on a lot of these videos and there was always people saying somebody should do it in a pickup truck with a giant gas tank in the back and I had a pickup truck in the garage and so my daily driver was a 2014 GMC Sierra that's a little bit unique in its configuration it's a z60 high performance package and of course when I bought the truck I didn't know what it meant but I had to look it up and if you're familiar with GM trucks it's the opposite of a Z71 off-road package the truck's Factory lowered 2 in and it's got a really stiff front end so the truck drives like a car and my family and I made a bunch of road trips in it I knew it was pretty comfortable and competent road trip pickup truck and so I'm reading these comments that somebody should put a giant fuel tank in the back and see what they could do and so my journey really became about bar talk with your buddies that gets out of control I started asking questions and started going to some friends and and seeing what they thought about it and the first question that you really ask is how how much gas do you need to go nonstop because that's in theory what makes the truck even remotely you know respectable in a cannonball and so I'd kind of done some cocktail napkin math and figured out it was about 200 gallons that the truck would need the next question becomes well can the truck carry that much weight so I go to this farm community you know down the road from where I was living I buy one of those IBC totes big plastic box that they keep fluids in and I put 200 gallons of water in the truck and the truck it was within payload but I start to drive it around and it's slushing and the truck's unmanageable and I think I slid through a stop sign at some point trying to stop it but I knew that the truck could carry the weight and then actually did the math on the gasoline and the gasoline is about for 200 gallons is about 1386 pounds so the first question gets answered it's within payload of the truck now you've got to solve some other problems about going after David's Tom for the Old Spanish Trail solo record so now it's can the truck survive like this is not a high performance vehicle no matter what the GM badge says on the side of it I started asking some questions got a good friend of mine named Steve Peterson who's a GM master technician at the time now he's got his own shop and he would service the truck so I go in one day and I ask him I said Steve can this truck run for let's call it 40 hours at over 25 00 RPM to 3,000 RPM maxed out speed for 40 hours at full payload and Steve who's a very straightforward Common Sense guy says yeah I said no I don't think you understand like we're talking about there's this Cannonball thing and can the truck run as hard as it possibly can for this long at full payload he goes absolutely GM engineered it to do that he goes you're not asking it to do something that the engineers at GM you know didn't expect it to do so I keep going on further and further they're waiting for somebody to tell me no this is not going to work next thing I know I'm at this welding shop cuz I knew if I'm going to put 200 gallons of gasoline in the back of the truck you don't do that yourself you find professionals that can take care of it and on my way back and forth to work there's this welding shop and I knew that they did tank work so I stopped in after work one day and said hey I got a question for you can you build a baffled gasoline fuel cell that will fit in the back of this truck t-shaped as much weight forward of the was possible and I kind of laid it out and I said look I'm just going to take some long trips with it and the guy looks at me says yeah and I said well not like can you make sure like it's pressure tested it's not going to leak it's not I'm going to have sloshing issues can we kind of subdivide this tank and he goes yeah we can do that so again somebody else doesn't tell me no I get those guys to start to put together this custombuilt fuel cell for the back of the truck and we had to figure out you know now a whole another list of problems like any Cannonball car how do you make it survive cuz it doesn't matter how fast you can go if your car doesn't survive so we now start to work diligently on preparing the truck we start to go through the engine look for any failure points there basically anything that was a wear item was changed on the truck she gets brand new Michelin tires go through brakes rotors anything to make sure that the truck is prepared as possible to do this and the brakes and rotors were really important because as much weight as it's carrying you got to be able to stop this thing so we put a lot of time and effort into it and we started to do weight testing on the bed of the truck with the weight and I noticed that it only sagged about an inch in the back so it really wasn't too bad but we went ahead and we put Firestone Rod r airbags on the back of the truck because I'd seen the movie The Mule with Clint Eastwood and this guy's driving around a pickup truck all over the country doing crazy stuff and I didn't want to be going in the middle of the night with the truck tilted up we somebody would know there's a cover over the back and the headlights are pointed up didn't want to get into that scenario so we put the airbags on the back with a control where we can adjust the ride height for the truck so we kind of start working through all these issues and then next thing I know the truck's coming together then I reached out to David and so David Simpson was incredibly gracious with his time I basically sent him a Facebook message didn't know him at all asked if I could have an hour of his time to talk about this and he was so cool about it gave me a bunch of time answered all of my questions and was incredibly supportive like he kind of vetted asked me about the build and what I was doing and of course everybody's eybrow goes up when you say I'm going to run it non-stop in a pickup truck get through that conversation with David he begins to introduce me to people within different groups introduces me to Doug and Arie a couple of other folks because he said somebody's going to have to validate your time and remember this is the guy whose record I'm trying to take start to talk it through I keep David updated next thing I know I'm backed up to a sand dune in Jacksonville Florida with 220 gallons of gasoline in the back of the truck because even though it was built for 200 I found out it would hold 220 now at this point I don't know if I need a do number on the side of this thing or hazmat placards but I'm completely loaded the truck's sitting there ready and what's cool about the Old Spanish Trail route is it goes from Jacksonville Florida all the way to San Diego and it's a true beach to beach run so I'm backed up to the Sand Dune and I take off and I've got these folks from the community watching they're validating the time I'm going on and that run was not without problems like a lot of folks in the community had ventilation problems with the tank so I actually had to stop about four or five times to throw gas in the truck however though it worked out so I was fortunate enough to I exceeded David's Time by about 30 to 40 minutes so all of the sudden out of nowhere I'm you know holding the solo time for the Old Spanish Trail R which was incredible I never never thought this pickup truck would be able to do anything like that I never thought that I would be able to do anything like that so incredibly happy about it well then the chatter starts well what are you going to do next with the truck and so got to meet more and more people in The Cannonball community and I got invited to the southern classic which is the Smoky and the Bandit themed event where you run from Atlanta Georgia pick up a sixpack of course beer and Texas Arcana and come back as that event was kind of evolving it was moving to more of a period correct but there were still some what they called Outlaw uh classes people that could run with your BR kind of deal and I showed up one year just to meet people have a good time and run the route the truck performed incredibly well in that event too I was actually able to set the solo time for that course which I still hold at 15 hours even so that was a great event because now the truck was participating in around much faster cars at one point during the event we're all kind of chattering back and forth and I'm trying to run down you know one of the fellow participants who's in a much you know faster vehicle than I'm in and I get this message that says you're not going to catch us and I had the thought of mine to respond back you need gas and so there was this great moment where I'm trying to reel somebody in and then you see the dot go off the map and they've got to fill up and the truck with the fuel cell just keeps chugging along and then ultimately the question comes up when are you going to run New York worked at La and so I really became interested in it because I knew that in the Old Spanish Trail route the truck didn't run Non-Stop and that's was supposed to be what it was built to do you know taking off 30 to 45 minutes of fuel stops would give the truck a respectable time so you start to prep for New York to LA and I started to look at some of the spreadsheet times and what was out there and I wasn't necessarily going for a time but I knew what the time was for Non-Stop and and again I really wanted the truck to perform but one of my heroes of cannibal is Dennis madg manini and he is memorialized with the GMC duy that's shown in the movie Dennis actually ran a Chevy douly in the 79 event it received the friends of OPEC award I think he was carrying 160 to 170 gallons in this truck and so he's been my hero I wanted to be able to say well this was the fastest truck in Cannonball so I set off to New York I'm in Manhattan got a group of people that are following again my goal is really to run Non-Stop and see what I can do with the truck time take off in the truck and it's interesting kind of like what Ed says doesn't matter how prepared you are you're going to pull the handle on the slot machine of fade and you're going to get what you get the Run starts I'm leaving Manhattan I'm coming past the Empire State Building and the Lincoln Tunnel shuts down for a crash so I have to reroute a little bit go through through the South tunnel in Manhattan that cost me a little bit of time take off get a pretty good head of steam built up and then as I get to St Louis I get to the west side of St Louis the traffic stops and it starts to slow down they're hanging a power line across the Interstate at 6:00 in the morning so that starts to slow me down a little bit and then as I'm going across Arizona there's a Red Flag Warning and there's a 50 mph uh wind coming out of the West now what I'm driving is an aerodynamic brick on a good day now it's got a 50 mph headwind and it is just screaming across Arizona trying to maintain any speed while turning these high RPMs and that really slowed the truck down a little bit but I get to the Pino and so it's another solo run the truck performed nonstop put my seat Bel on in Manhattan took it off at the Pino and the truck is just a Mess by the time it gets to the Pino I get there at about 2:30 3:00 in the morning and the security guy comes walking out and says you know hey can I help you and I essentially stumble out of the truck I can barely stand the truck's filthy there's half of a tumble weed shoved in the grill of the truck it just looks like a complete mess and I was able to set a time that was 35 hours and 3 minutes which at the time had set the new non-stop record it was 11 minutes short of Dennis's truck record and I was so heartbroken over it and you know and honestly because you're by yourself I really wasn't paying too much attention to the time I was just trying to get there when I found out it was 11 minutes it was just so you know deflating but everybody was so supportive the truck had done what it was built to do performed great and so ever since then I spend time looking at the truck and chasing 11 minutes this month we've got our two best deals ever back from gloss we've got their DIY ceramic coating kit which is a $210 value including their graphine ceramic coating plus a bottle of their ceramic detail spray which makes the application so easy an idiot like me can do it in my own garage has a $210 value for just $69.99 or if free is the better price you can get a bottle of their award-winning detail spray for free just pay the shipping and handling we've had to limit that so I don't know how many are left but check the links in the description below and find out which you can get either way you're going to get some great glossed [Music] goodness

Channel: VINwiki

Views: 302,813

Keywords: vinwiki, car stories, automotive, car enthusiast, storytelling, car trek, ed bolian, vehicle history, carfax, car guy, automotive adventure, exotic cars, supercars, car story

Id: HRVu1U6o81U

Length: 13min 43sec (823 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 17 2023