Racing in the fastest Cannonball since 1983

this was gonna be the first real cannonball since 1983 the the stealthiness of just driving as fast as you want to go and just staying out of the sight of the police's is something that I was always on my mind is you know I started driving I would always have the latest radar detector and I would think about just building the ultimate car for cannonball so in 2006 the AMS time attack team had gone out and done the one lap of America so when the guys came back from one lap of America they actually had a like an underground application to do a cannonball run so it turned out that Brock Yates was thinking about doing another cannonball so I immediately applied I found some drivers that way you know we we had the idea that we're gonna do it in a diesel van and we were gonna make a giant fuel cell and try to do it without stopping it really never heard anything more about it it turns out the event never happened I stumbled upon this event called the 2904 it was kind of like the 24 hours of lemons meets the cannonball you had to buy a car pay for fuel pay for repairs tolls tickets everything to cross the country for two thousand nine hundred and four dollars which coincidentally is the distance between New York and San Francisco in 2015 he decided to do the event one last time and he was doing it from New York to LA the classic cannonball route red ball garage to the Portofino Inn in Redondo Beach and I just knew I had to do it immediately fill out the online application he responded to me and asked me are you the same Arnie that has the world's fastest hearse an 18 van in a Bluesmobile and I responded yeah that's me he said well it looks like you're in the right place you're in so we built this Crown Vic painted it black and the idea was stealth we wanted to have a car that looked like a police car to hopefully get people out of our way in the left lane and also when we blow past people on the road they don't call the least because well they think they just got passed by a police car so I had a pretty solid car yeah I was going into it knowing that I was probably gonna be the most well prepared car that the 2904 had ever seen it had a 55 gallon fuel cell in the trunk there was gravity fed to the factory 19 gallon tank so I had 74 gallons of gas I thought we know what I'm gonna do some air aerodynamic modifications so we made front and rear splitters out of plywood you know this car I was gonna go there and blow their minds but part of this race the organizer was saying that there was some cannonball celebrity that was going to show up and I wondered you know well who could that be maybe it was an Alex Roy it was it may be ed bolian who who held the overall cannonball record yeah was it Burt Reynolds you know I really didn't know so it's about two weeks before the event the car is basically fully prepped and you know I'm just gonna come in here and sweep this thing I'm gonna run the first cannonball in in years and I'm gonna win this thing and then two weeks before the event it got revealed who the celebrity cannonball guy was and that was at bouillon well ed had picked up a 2002's 55 AMG that was had 11 previous owners had twice been salvaged these cars are super expensive to maintain and repair well I mean brakes suspension everything that's really expensive was outside on the budget so I mean he basically took the rules dissected them and built the best car that he possibly could that's exactly what I thought I had done but he won up to me by a lot so he shows up with this blog post that documents in detail everything that he did how he painstakingly fixed the ignition switch because if you had to replace it was going to put him outside a budget so he had to take it apart and glue it and he had this Mercedes technician like a 30 year veteran of Mercedes that was honest team who just basically spent a thousand hours rebuilding this car for no money and he was within the rules I was sick to my stomach because I thought for sure that there wasn't a chance that anybody was gonna come close to me and I was just going to sweep this event so when I arrived there was Ed bouillon there with his s55 AMG and to me and is like the biggest celebrity so I you know I was thinking that he's gonna have bodyguards and he's not gonna want to talk to anybody because he's such a celebrity turns out he's the nicest most most down-to-earth guy there is Dave Black Ed's co-driver from the record run was there in a 2003 Mercedes CLK 430 they also had another friend of theirs Dan who had an Audi a8 they also had another friend Dave Simpson with a Lexus SC 430 so the cars were set to leave in 30 minute intervals I know and bolian had the pole position at midnight and that was the ideal time to leave so I wanted 12:30 the organizer the way he decides if you there's two people that want the same start time is Indian leg wrestling well you might know what that is I at the time did not know what it was Indian leg wrestling has a lot to do about leverage and Dave Black is quite a bit taller than miles and well we lost the time so the next available time slot was 3:00 in the morning and I knew that was not good because that was gonna put me into LA right in rush hour so I knew I was in trouble so we left the red ball garage at 256 in the morning on Halloween turns out that Manhattan is always crazy to get out of but we did manage to get out of there in 11 minutes so that the Crown Vic did pretty good with getting people out of the way sometimes people would sit in the left lane because they're scared of what they think is a police car so you know it kind of had it was a double double-edged sword sometimes it worked really well sometimes it was a hindrance so we are making good time in Pennsylvania and we ended up passing the only other 2904 participant of the event in Pennsylvania another Crown Vic we are going along the northern route so most people were actually taking the southern route because well it's a it's a little bit shorter and you don't have to deal with the mountains in Colorado which I didn't think about at the time and then all of a sudden we got motioned off the road by the police apparently they had shut down the road there was a accident with a fatality nothing to do with any of our people so that was our first mishap that reroute probably cost us about 15 minutes through Pennsylvania the the Sun started to come up were averaging we're pretty much going in the the low 100 110 120 miles an hour you know we made really good time going through Ohio and through Indiana same thing Illinois we we met with a friend of ours who came out and kind of paced with us for a while got some video footage from the outside the car and you know continuing to IO I was getting into the afternoon and I was probably the worst state for us because apparently if you're in the left lane in Iowa in a police car or what seems to be a police car pulls behind you you just squat in the left lane and that was a little little painful got into Nebraska a little bit of the same and that's where we made our first drivers change so miles had actually driven from Manhattan to Lincoln Nebraska so we did the drivers change and filled up in Lincoln Nebraska I was driving and I was on a mission I knew I had to raise our average speed which was about 85 miles an hour and I really wanted to see it at 90 I really wanted to get to LA before morning traffic on Monday and I knew that I just had to be on it 120 miles an hour just coming up on people people getting out of the way because they see what appears to be a police officer in a big hurry and we were just going for it so across Nebraska our average speed was continually rising 86 87 miles an hour and we ran up on some sort of Mercedes and we passed by him and that I think kind of upset him because he I think he was thinking that we were a police officer and we blew past him and then he realized he saw the Illinois plates and saw that we weren't an officer so he decides well what do you do when you're angry with somebody on the road you're gonna pass him and you're going to show them so and blowing past us and we end up having a scout for the next hour so we're going 120 130 miles an hour and this guy is just going and I'm just hanging back just kind of enjoying the ride and you know it's time to change drivers and get some fuel and I think we're at an average speed of about 88 miles an hour at that point so I had raised it up quite a bit and we head out from the gas station in Colorado and this is where things start to get dicey and where I realized that I kind of made a mistake taking the northern route because the mountains in Colorado are brutal we would be going 90 95 miles an hour when the car would shift into third gear we would actually lose speed well we had to keep the average speed up as high as we could so this wasn't going to work so we floored the Crown Vic up the mountains in second gear as fast as it would go I thought for sure we're gonna blow the thing up but we made it through the mountains no problem smelled a little little like coolant I think Utah was probably our fastest state because Utah is a whole lot of nothing we've got an 80 mile an hour speed limit and there ain't nobody in the middle of the night in Utah so even with a driver change on the side of the road we ended up with an average speed across Utah 100 miles an hour we're at about an 89 mile an hour average which 89 miles an hour average that's I mean pretty darn close to Alex Roy's I think he was at 90 miles an hour average on his time of 31 hours four minutes you know without traffic we were gonna break 32 hours and seven minutes which technically is the Cannonball competition record that was set in 1983 of course Alex Roy and Ed bolian had beaten that time but they had solo runs and they could choose exactly what time they wanted to leave and you know it wasn't a competition so if I could break 32 hours in seven minutes I would technically be the Cannonball Run record holder as far as in events goes descending into California miles was back behind the wheel there's a long descent on i-15 downhill and we just kept it floored the whole way and that's where we hit our terminal velocity of one hundred thirty nine point nine miles an hour and that was probably about five minutes of wide-open throttle downhill we lost an hour and a half sitting in rush hour and just to be racing across country as fast as we could and then to get there just a sit in traffic was just devastating I just I wanted to jump out of the car it was it was horrible I wanted to turn around I wanted to go home because I knew that our chances of winning were gone you know edie head had called in at 4:00 in the morning he had a time of 32 hours and five minutes he had broken the record by two minutes he now held the Cannonball Run competition record as well and it didn't look good for us we ended up getting there at 8:59 in the morning and we had a time of 33 hours and three minutes which actually is the sixth fastest time of anyone to ever run in a Cannonball Run competition in a 500-dollar X police car X taxicab with a quarter million miles on it edie bolian had come out to congratulate us the first thing out of Ed's mouth mouth was you know if you would have got your start time you would have beaten us [Applause] if you liked 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 super cars hit over 20 racetracks 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: 436,630

Rating: 4.9014287 out of 5

Keywords: Cannonball Run, The 2904, NY to LA, New York, Los Angeles, Cross Country, Road Trip, Gumball Rally, Gumball 3000, GoldRush Rally, P71, Crown Vic, Police Car, Cop Car, Ed Bolian, Arne Toman, VINwiki, Car Stories, Red Ball Garage, Portofino Hotel and Marina

Id: PIg08s7L6ho

Length: 12min 57sec (777 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 30 2017