Outrunning the American Express Algorithm on a Cannonball

and I said well I'm not going to explain to you exactly why it is possible when you begin to contemplate the idea of a cross-country Drive particularly a long-distance drive with a particular time goal like a record there's a ton of variables that you've got to control manipulate or at least understand and that would include things like the police the navigation your own physiology the health of the car weather traffic road conditions accidents ahead anything that you could possibly understand that could stand in the way of your goal you've got only anticipating you've got to work with and one of those huge things is fuel and the reason fuel is so important is that it really doesn't matter how fast you go if you're stopped for a very long time it's gonna derail your time and it's gonna make it impossible to achieve a great time so our moving average was a hundred point three miles an hour and our overall average was about 98 miles an hour meaning that two mile per hour Delta was based on the fuel stops that we had and the driver changes as I was doing all this research I had the unbelievable benefit of seeing two people make new claims at this record and Alex Roy and Dave Maher in the BMW m5 they drove had claimed six fuel stops and Richard Rawlings and Dennis Collins we're on a 550 Maranello and they had claimed six or seven as well and my goal was to cut that in half and so that was one of the primary reasons for choosing the Mercedes S or C L platform so the first two cars that I bought to try this out were 2003's 55 s but for other reasons and I was daily driving the prostitute Guyardo for a while I ended up selling them and I bought the CL the same day in fact that I had bought the orange Oh 8 lp640 roadster and I chose those cars because of the active body control suspension now if you watch wanted to varnishes videos or read anything on the internet about these cars you're gonna find that the ABC suspension the hydraulic suspension in these cars is the Achilles heel it's what makes them so expensive to operate so expensive to maintain and so difficult to own and it's a big part of the $9,000 service bill that I had to departure on the record run but they level the suspension out multiple times per second and you could have two adult mins stand in the trunk and the car is gonna sit flat and so I wanted to put enough fuel in to just have three stops so the easy math is three thousand miles four tanks of gas gets you to about 750 miles worth of range that I needed so I needed something around 60 to 65 gallons worth of usable fuel including the 23 gallon tank that was already in the car and so what I ended up going with was two additional 23 gallon fuel cells that were sort of side-by-side and I would fill those with the nearside tank and then I would wrap around the other side and you and fill the primary tank with the opposite side nozzles so he'd go as quickly as possible so that was a plan and we built it we tested it and it did not exactly go off without a hitch on our way up we were obviously learning the car Dave and Dan were sort of learning where all their everything was at and how all the buttons worked and how all the systems were functioning and so we decided to test out the fuel system and so our bench testing was noticing that we were moving about a gallon a minute and so our thought was to transfer for about 15 minutes to move the car to move it from just under a quarter tank to just over three-quarters of a tank with you know some margin of error so on the way up we're going through north of South Carolina and Davis actuated the transfer pumps so we're moving fuel from the auxilary tanks into the primary tank and before too long we have a guy pull up next to us who'd been flashing his lights and honking his horn so we roll the window down and we just expect that we've been speeding past him and he's upset about that but instead he motions for us to roll down windows and says you're leaking gas I said goodness gracious and obviously all of our mental images go to this extreme atomic fireball that we're about to be beneath and so we quickly exit and get out Dan grabs the fire extinguisher and we go around to the trunk and we open everything all of our luggage is packed jammed against the tank everything we've got to wear for the next few days so we're faced with the prospect of probably fuel soaked clothing and everything else that we'd ever need but we open it up we obviously everything smells like gas and as it turned out the transfer rate was about a gallon and a half every minute it was working faster in the car and so we had probably overfilled the primary tank by about five gallons and that had all run fortunately not back into the trunk because of the 180 degree turn that we were making just over the gas cap it ended up dripping down through the quarter panel and out underneath the car and in fact all over this good samaritans windshield and so fortunately he can proceed along his way and wasn't terribly upset about it and we learned that we needed to shorten those transfer times so we ended up doing it for about eight to ten minutes each time as we went through so for each tank we would make four transfers we had 44 gallons to move in and the gauges that we had installed were fairly rudimentary and not very reliable so we never really knew exactly how much was in there but we had a lot of tally marks and a lot of stopwatches going to make sure that it all worked and it did work I think our first stop we made just over eight hundred miles so we were well over any threshold of what we would need to be and the first stop took nine minutes so we get out swipe the credit cards on both sides put the nearside tank in the auxilary tanks and the farside pump into the primary tank and it took us a little time to fuel enough time to run in use the restroom stretch our legs a little bit of void blood clots and so we're back on the road in nine minutes the second stop did not go so well we were near grew Texas and I would get out of the car and I swipe my credit card and everything's declined so I have another one declined it's like everything I can't get any credit cards to work Dave and Dan are exhausted we've gone 852 miles on this tank of gas so they're stumbling inside and I yell at them guys you gotta get back out here nothing's working and in fact we hadn't brought enough cash to pay for all the fuel that would have been a good idea you just over pay for the gas throw it in to have them turn the pumps on and then your you're out a little bit quicker a pointer for anyone trying to break 2850 but we go through everybody else's credit cards finally get some to work and we get them working that stop ended up taking us about 12 minutes and so we get back in the car and I immediately get all these fraud alert text messages and emails to my phone saying that we've seen some suspicious activity on your credit cards and a few seconds later my phone rings and I get a phone call and the call was a little bit odd it was from American Express and they said I guess I've said you know this is it and they said well we've detected some strange activity on your card we want you to verify it I said well I know what you're talking about it's absolutely delight Amit and they said well our algorithm said that the point in which you used it last and this point were too far apart and the flight schedules which we constantly analyzed could not have gotten you from that point a to that point be in time to make the charge and I said well I'm not going to explain to you exactly why it is possible but trust me that my cards will not be out of my possession for the next 24 hours and I don't care what I buy it's not fraudulent it's mine so send it on and please don't interfere with anything in it for the next little while so we get back in the car we're back on the road and you know just cruising right along and in fact our third stop went much much better we were much more exhausted fortunately but we ended up getting everything to work and we didn't completely fill the tank because we didn't need to to get all the way in to LA and so that top that stopped only took us seven minutes so we had 9 12 and 7 minutes 28 minutes total stopped we had to stop twice to add oil because the car was burning far more oil than we anticipated and we would stop about halfway through each tank and switch drivers on the side of the road and pee and so we were stopped for a total of 46 minutes including the time stopped leaving Manhattan and so that's that's where the differential comes from but you can never make up for stop time and that's why fuel is such a big part of a cannonball if you like that story it's time to make one of your own extreme experience puts you in the driver's seat of some of those the best supercars that over 20 racetracks coast-to-coast with no speed limits no shipping restrictions and no governor head to the link to choose your supercar find a racetrack near you and start making a story of your own extreme experience it's your turn

Channel: VINwiki

Views: 1,229,465

Rating: 4.8390894 out of 5

Keywords: World Record, Fuel, Gasoline, Cannonball Run, Ed Bolian, Cannonball, NY to LA, New York, Los Angeles, Cross Country, Mercedes Benz, CL55, S55, AMG, VINwiki, Car Stories, Alex Roy, Dave Maher, Speeding, Tickets, Red Ball Garage, Portofino Hotel, Dave Black, Dan Huang, Mercedes CL55 AMG

Id: HkZNddd9Pxc

Length: 9min 3sec (543 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 03 2017