The INSANE Solo Cannonball Record Claim!

at this point i was worried about law enforcement because i was at a point where they were gonna check my car [Music] i had started planning a solo run about a year ago a lot of people told me you need to do this and it was from people that you know i highly respected and i'm looking at these people i'm like oh you're the man you know you're you're the fastest out there you're the guy to beat i had people coming up to me like doug doug says hey fred you know you know when are you gonna do your run what are you gonna do it in last winter after he broke the 27-25 record we actually had dinner for christmas and doug and i talked over his time and we we sat and had talked over it over the last few months and when we're talking about his time i told him point blank that realistically 27 25 i didn't think was beatable by hours i felt 27 25 was beatable by minutes i i felt doug and arnie had taken some of some of the time that was known to be left on the table and basically eliminated that gap so when we had the discussion one of the things we basically said was the only way that it would even be beatable by minutes was if somebody just no care whatsoever and that's kind of where i balanced my entire run on is the conversation with doug that the only way to get to the next level is you have to start changing things that other people didn't do number one was the fuel tanks number two was a car that was as capable or faster than the last car that set the record and beyond that you had to take advantage of things like fuel stops the fuel stop's probably the biggest advantage of the whole entire run the there's nobody that could do this that wouldn't think not only as you know was put in one perspective back crazy but eliminate the stop so you have one stop as adverse to multiple stops because as anybody knows the more stops you make it it drags on and on and on and on and it brings your average down and down and down down that was another perspective now being a solo driver a lot of people you know have asked me did i put uh cameras or did i videotape the run or or you know who did this or who did that and i have to tell people i say you know texting and driving is illegal can you imagine trying to drive the speed i was driving and make sure everything was refreshed make sure your gopro is running and make sure all that's going on because it's just not realistically possible you're in a different zip code even just having two people having my brother navigate or or having him be able to spot for cops or or look the other direction you know when when you're you know passing a car or something it changes the whole aspect of what the run is is really about so when people you know think of different things about you know how did you document or how could you document it i really kind of was limited based on you know who i could tell and who i could trust and be able to still maintain my goal because if i didn't meet my goal then the rest of it didn't matter so after talking to doug and talking about some of the issues that he had uh i decided to you know change that up a bit basically it kind of became one of those things that i felt if i didn't do it i wouldn't just be letting myself down i'd be letting other people down when i saw the record fall and we were watching it on glimpse and stuff and i was calling them out as they were coming into portofino i said man these guys did this they don't have any experience they didn't really even pick a good car if these guys can do it in this then somebody with experience really could lay a number down and honestly i got on the phone with arnie i got on the phone with doug i'm like hey you guys need to make this happen i'll do whatever i can to help you make it happen i'll drive with you i'll spot with you you know if one of you can't go i'll go you know this needs to this needs to come back home you know arne and doug both great guys they have their they have they're just like me they have their own thing going on they know what they want to do and um you know lo and behold i just started planning my own gig basically what we started out with in late april uh was talking to my brother about coming down and doing a run with him and myself that changed because my brother couldn't get time off work and as the covid started going away in her home state this turned into a solo adventure and solo adventure meaning that i was gonna take the time i had on my hands as i'd done over the last few months and start planning and prepping a car to make a solo run from new york to la using a vehicle that was capable of a speed that was better than the audi and was lighter than the audi and i could replace the the people with fuel so by replacing the people with fuel tanks i was going to gain uh by throwing somebody out of the car like every three hours a lot of people you know don't understand you know gasoline is only like 6.2 6.3 pounds per gallon so with approximately 130 gallons added to the car and the seats removed and the spare tire and the jack the rear interior the rear seats everything i could take out of the car to lighten it up by the time i had weighed the car with myself full of fuel i was actually within the stock parameters of the gvwr of the car one of the biggest things was being able to have a car that factory could handle the extra weight but also would be fast enough you know in in stock trim and money wise the best way to do that was go to the rental station and and rent a car my buddy dropped me off and i headed to my my friend ricky creekmore's and commenced to tearing the car apart they'd been there about three hours walked outside the shop i heard a little bit of a commotion and there's three goats standing on this rental car that i've literally had for about two hours so i shoot the goats off the car get rid of the goats the biggest thing about the tanks was a lot of people don't know about my cobra from the 2019 c2c run still in oklahoma so we had a 50 plus gallon tank that was custom made for that car for the 2019 run i started taking measurements out of that removed the tank from the car brought it to the the shop and it literally was a perfect fit for the car after i get the tanks done i made a bracket so i could put the front driving light on and in order to do that i trimmed the license plate moved the license plate up slid the license plate up mounted the mounted the light underneath of it and that was pretty much everything i did at the shop there wasn't a lot more i did there i put my antennae in and hooked up my my small simple cb and beyond that you know we were pretty much ready to go i decided that you know found the date i've done a lot of researching as far as to what traffic was flowing where and we decided the optimal time which was unorthodox was to leave during a city day more often than not these runs are done on the weekend but i started noticing as the pandemic had worn off there was more people traveling on the weekends and less people traveling during the week because at the time we left it was easier to get out of the city where there's people coming into the city so we literally were in and out of new york in pretty much no time at all which which allowed me to to get up to speed and where i needed to be my brother and i you know did the balancing act of should it be what time we should do this and what day we should do it and with him following traffic patterns and me following traffic patterns we just decided that this might be an optimal window that nobody had possibly chosen before my shoot time was for 26 hours under sub 26 we were thinking 25 30ish and you know like everything stuff happens on the run so we got into new york we're probably around 4 a.m and i sat around and kind of had to wait being on a solo run you don't really have anybody to talk to you kind of rely on yourself you know to keep your sanity or or what little i have i made my own mask so i could pull it up over my face and if somebody said something headed out of new york about six a.m about 6 00 a.m i uh got to the tunnel there was virtually no traffic it was as smooth sailing as i had ever seen in new york especially especially for a weekday it really kind of played right into our hands uh the first stretch of road we ran pretty much trouble free there was no no cop issues probably one of the craziest things across this whole run is i didn't see any lasers there was no laser whatsoever any state anywhere that was one thing we had planned for and after putting an alp system in it which tends to be an expensive system fortunately i had it from from the previous car run but we didn't need it i never saw it at one point where i really need it we made some decent time coming through pennsylvania we had some construction there's a pretty good chunk of construction where uh came through wheeling wheeling i wouldn't say bottled up but probably where i ran into first first bit of traffic with construction got to the wrong side of the cones at one point in order to get by some people the standard of my run and it's seen in actually one of the pictures and has been brought up a couple times is my cruise control anybody that's ever ever been in one of these cars before probably never puts a cruise control above 80 85 so i decided and we had talked about this before the run i'm going to put the cruise control on the fastest speed it allows me to and there's the reason for that is to keep myself from getting lazy anybody that's done a solo run before i've done i've done a couple of them you actually realize that oh man you know i'm supposed to be going x amount of speed somebody's passing me in a caravan to keep that from happening to keep the speed up i put my cruise control on 120 and drove with my foot above that so at times where maybe my foot had laxed off or my foot got tired or you know i had to relieve myself like i kept the main team now it didn't stay at 120 the whole time obviously but mentally that was one of the tools that i used to keep my speed my average up other than that a lot of it was done with calculations for my brother we made really good time coming across ohio didn't see a single officer which was terribly unusual for ohio the officers were minimal i saw a few going the other way most weren't running radar unfortunately i didn't have any spotters but at this speed it helped me not have spotters because what i had developed in thinking is driving at this speed and having spotters could draw more attention to actually what was going on especially during a weekday um to have you know four or five different people you know go and buy somebody at a high rate of speed you take that opportunity of getting called in more so we had no spotters through that end of it we got through and got into st louis made great time and then i got a bogey i had one uh an officer that basically paced me for i don't know seems like an eternity it always seems like an eternity um several miles and i don't know if it was the antenna on the back or or or what that the car kind of stood out but he paced me i may have been called in and uh you know eventually he pulled off got into tulsa uh tulsa i got in around what they'd be close to the rush hour but tulsa is a big city and the good thing about the big cities at this time right now is they're prepared for rush hour they have the lanes they have the traffic they have the they have the ability to handle handle volumes of cars so without volumes of cars there's volumes of room to get through them not too many trucker issues i had a couple truckers that were you know dating each other in the left and right lane and i radioed to them said uh trying to get through here and when i think they glance in the mirror i think they saw the light bar on the front of the car which is unusual for a mustang and they thought that possibly i was a pursuit car or maybe somebody had radioed to them and told them it was a pursuit car i don't know uh simple simple hey trying to get through here kind of slid out in their mirrors so they could see the car two maybe three of them properly pulled over the rest of them if i wasn't gonna put the lights on they weren't gonna care so and obviously you know i wasn't gonna do that so it didn't matter the car spent probably five to six hours at least on shut off at it and that's that's not terribly unrealistic it may have been a little bit more uh obviously you know it's nothing that you you log while you're going but uh there was times where i would sit rated 159 anybody tells you a stock mustang gt goes faster than 159 they're lying and and my foot would tell you the same thing because it doesn't matter how hard you step on it how hard you're going downhill it goes 159 miles an hour which at times is frustrating because at opportunities there was opportunities to probably run the 170s 180s but you were limited at what you had but that also helped me on the other end of my fuel my fuel consumption so you start getting up those speeds you start burning more fuel i had mathematically calculated that pretty much 130 was the magic number as far as on the phillips we filled up before we filled up in the middle and uh took me to the end and actually i think it had 39 miles to empty at the end of the whole run so the the mathematics and everything all played out and the car balanced really well and at the ends of runs obviously you know picked up speed picked up speed meaning that the the ideal is you want to get back to your target speed as quick as you can so you don't you don't lose on stops or lose on slow ups the fuel stop was uh pretty quick as i pulled into tulsa i had uh messaged ahead to my friends uh grant and brady grant had a newer model chevrolet with a 150 gallon bulk tank that an actual bulk tank used for filling up machinery fire machinery and he had a 20 gallon per minute pump so as i came off the interstate to the toll booth i could see them parked in stage grant told me to pull around the back of the cars so that he'd have the pump ready and i had already popped the trunk before i had even got stopped there's two fillers on the uh big 50 gallon tank we use one for the vent and one to fill it or if we're at a pump you can fill put two in at the same time he started filling that it was filled in minutes while he was doing that i'd quick relieve myself kind of stood up stretch took a couple pictures went around the side climbed into the side took the caps off and started filling those tanks got the back tank filled and the side tank fill and i was literally off in eight minutes you know quick snapped a couple pictures you know thank the guys i think he brought me some beef jerky and maybe a water and uh lo and behold i get i get a message from him like two minutes later the cops are here and somewhere along the lines apparently somebody had called the cops for whatever reason either my car had been spotted leaving the interstate and it because a high rate of speeds going through tulsa or somebody had seen us at this little parking lot filling up this car with this great big bulk tank so i don't know exactly the reason but the guy got out i guess and kind of walked around and didn't see nothing to deal with and he's gotten his vehicle left everything was going really well uh my brother was in my ear telling me i was doing decent i was sending him him the shots he was giving me bullet points of where you need to be how you need to be where i fell off and then i got to california and i pulled into california and i don't get stressed out about much nothing really bothers me and there i am sitting at the border at the agricultural stop at zero miles an hour sleep deprivation all started setting in going you're sitting here with a fuel tank next to you covered up by a blanket what are you going to do and as i said you know apparently it was it was closer to 20 minutes i sat there but strangely enough when you do these runs usually when you're doing them everybody's around you so you're you're not worried about the law enforcement at this point you're just worried about the trafficking now the way she can drive fast again at this point i was worried about law enforcement because i was at a point where they were going to check my car and they moved the out-of-staters to one side and they had a guy's car tore apart and i just kept saying to myself that's i'm going to jail i am going to jail and started planning on how i was going to get bailed out how i was going to get the car back and how i was going to get back home so eventually they ran us through the line and got up to the front and i put my window down and the guy asked me what my business was in california and why i was from texas and i told him that i had taken a job in california and that i was headed there because i was an essential worker and i was bringing all my stuff with me he kind of tilted his head he said yep thank you very much have a good day the relief was there but i needed to get back on my task of what i was there to do so i got out of there as fast as i could possibly go and at that point it was make or break it the window had shrunk now we're not looking at 25 30 anymore we're looking at you know can i even do it under 26. so i get into the area it starts it starts getting a little more congested you know in the downtown los angeles area everybody knows what i mean where you're driving in the desert you can all out and you know that pretty much you know if somebody catches you they catch you and there was nothing literally flat out as fast as i could run through california up the hill down over the sweep and into the into into the city of los angeles then the lights started coming and i could see lights in my mirror and i said to myself i have got to do something because i'm there's no question i'm going to jail there's there's no there's no yes officer no officer i'm transferring fuel for you know covid relief it's i am going to jail as he approached me there was an exit coming up immediately got off the exit and i got redirected so i basically took the series of exits and lost the officer as i got off it turned me back around so i was headed back the direction i was supposed to so this is the one time that i can actually thank my gps for recalculating because it recalculated me that when i got off it turned me and turned me and turned me and put me back in the same direction i was going i saw the blue lights disappear and i can only assume he must have taken taken the wrong direction just it was one for four so he had four directions to choose and fortunately for me he chose the wrong direction but at that point paranoia was starting to set in more and the sleep deprivation i was still i was still on it as far as you know ability and awareness and stuff but my awareness was higher and higher because you don't know if he's called ahead you know and you start going those places oh does he does he know i'm cannonballing did he send somebody to the portofino and somebody's going to be there as i went down through and and started you know going through the lights and stuff and pulling up the portofino and i i pull in and i look around i'm looking around and i don't really see anybody there's support of phenom it's four in the morning you know four or five in the morning nobody's around nobody's doing anything i'm from maine i'm i'm thinking like there's gonna be some big fanfare there at four in the morning i roll into portofino and first thing i start to do is snapping the pictures and you know send in something to my brother say hey we made it this is my time so we broke the 26 and funniest part of the whole thing is while i'm doing this my brother's taking my dad to the airport so he can fly into tulsa where my house is in oklahoma so we can go on the bandit run so my brother's doing updates he's been up all all day and night doing all this with me and he's taking my dad to the airport so as as we're doing it and he's driving along and takes and he's dropped my dad off so i get all the pictures and stuff and i see i see the caretaker come by on the golf cart and i'm like oh no i quick flip the car around snap the picture on the front of it and head it out pulled in behind the crab shack ripped all the laser jammers had taken the antenna off throwing it in my trunk and literally out of california sooner i get out of california the better you're here because you like a good car story but let's be honest we've probably watched enough youtube videos for a lifetime during the pandemic it's time to get out of the house and make a story of your own extreme experience puts you in the driver's seat of some of the world's most exciting cars like this 2020 corvette c8 at over 30 racetracks across the country and right now we're giving away fifty thousand dollars to the track experiences and thirty percent off 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Channel: VINwiki

Views: 1,303,240

Keywords: Cannonball Run, VINwiki, Car Stories, New York, Los Angeles, Rental, Ford Mustang, Mustang, Road Trip, Record, COVID, Pandemic, Shutdown, strategy, fuel cell, refueling, C2C Express, The 2904, Arne Toman, Ed Bolian, Doug Tabbutt, Alex Roy, Avis, Hertz, lockdown, truckers, traffic, police, countermeasures

Id: EvQFDtJUdHw

Length: 21min 48sec (1308 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 24 2020