They're the fastest bootleggers in history!

the best way i can describe this is if the devil was designing a perfect place in hell for a car guy it would be that he'd have you race a camry in a porsche 911 and always lose so it's hard to believe but there is somebody who loves burt reynolds more than mr arnie tomen and his name is taylor hall and he has organized a race which i think originally was called the bandit run but that might be copy written by a rally which has really no semblance to the bandit run kind of about the same as you know the gumball is to the cannonball run to texarkana to get coors banquet beer just like in the smoky and the bandit movie he created it uh as a well we can't say that it's a race but it's a race having done such feats as the cannonball i wanted to participate in this as well because it's right up my alley speed run competition chance to win you know risk everything gain nothing absolutely sounds like my type of fun and of course had to uh do it with my partner in crime arnie and arnie is the world's best burt reynolds fan he's got a resto modded trans am with an ls3 in it that he's constantly doing videos with coors light in the back and then he also has a 77 trans am that his neighbor owned when he was a kid and he recently got the opportunity to buy this bandit trans am from his neighbor's estate or whatever and kind of sort of restore it let's it's it's rusty and kind of beat up but that's that's perfect because then you can drive it so our plan was to do the bandit run in the bandit trans am we weren't trying to be fast i know that's a shocker for me and arnie but we just wanted to do it he was gonna do his uh best bert reynolds outfit uh my outfit was to be determined but it was maybe gonna be snowmen but probably not so i'll let you all guess what the other option was and maybe a week before the event uh just the trans am wasn't going to get done and arnie had some other obligations and wasn't able to make it lined up a co-driver ed was unavailable my wife was unwilling so uh dave black ed's co-driver volunteered happily so essentially the two fastest co-drivers in the world got together so back in january this year i got a call from ed bullion um to asking if i was willing to do a bandit run so the two movies that i have found to be the most influential in my life absolutely smoking the bandit cannonball run and from a movie standpoint smoking the bandit i think is a better movie cannonball had a little more influence on me but i loved both of them for the core premises that these were long distance trips cannonball especially i mean the fact that it's new york to la and then uh you know with bandit it was a 28-hour run all the other stuff all the other parts of the story those were nice but i really love the idea that you're under this deadline to be able to do this really fast so i've always been just a huge fan of uh all the burt reynolds movies uh he bert reynolds is my spirit animal so i get this call from adam to do this it was with doug tabit who's arnie tomen's co-driver and i thought this is going to be really cool because here you have the two fastest co-drivers in the country doing this run together and it just sounded like a blast to be able to have us kind of get out there and do our thing originally we set out just to have fun but in true cannonballer form we can never just have fun we have to try to win i met up with the guys down at the varsity restaurant in atlanta and afterwards doug and i drove up to where he was staying and i saw the car and it was this really lovely 911. i would call this color the ambiguously gray duo it won one angle it looked like one color gray from the other it looked slightly different so it was fantastic and it was really exciting i love the 911 i think they're absolutely wonderful cars i mean it's 60 years of refinement built into these and they're just always wonderful we had kind of a non-ideal departure time uh the slot started at midnight we took the last slot which was at 5 15 a.m so we really didn't get much nighttime driving but figured what the heck we're just going to get beer going for a leisurely drive doesn't really matter everyone else can compete so your departure time on a bandit run is a little different than a cannonball where in a cannonball you're sort of trying to structure it in a way that you don't hit la traffic at a certain time and what have you but with a bandit run there's a funny constraint alcohol is not allowed to be sold in texas until 7 a.m so you need to figure out kind of what your time is going to be to reach texarkana at 7 a.m if you want to maximize your time in the dark and so go ahead and we punch our time and we take off and waze just completely fails us because there's one way that you can get out of this place that puts you straight up onto the freeway ways for some reason another i just assumed they thought we were coming out of concert traffic and directed us through all these little side streets and then put us up on the freeway and we finally made our way out it probably cost a couple minutes but that is what it is we just worked with it and we got ourselves out on i-20 and just started cooking our way towards uh across the country dave turned out to be a fantastic co-driver i can see why ed chose him he was excellent on the binoculars we spent a good portion of the drive making fun of ed's non-stabilized bot at the last minute walmart binoculars that did him probably no good we had a really good rhythm we were working really well together it was the way i would describe it in the way that he and i drove is two very on the spectrum people approaching a 13-hour video game i mean we were both he was driving i'm sitting there calling we're switching he's calling i'm driving no other chatter nothing there might have been a little bit of discussion about ed's use of binoculars and that maybe you know but i will say that these binoculars were absolutely the most amazing thing that you could ever ever use for this type of thing they're gyro stabilized they have this really incredible long distance view and what that does is it compresses all of the visuals so that what's coming towards you looks like it's standing still you can literally sit there and look at each single car and just study it so we quickly got into a rhythm and got up to speed and got our average up to 90 and then 100 and then i think about 106. we're making really good time across i-20 i think we've hit an average of close to 106 at this point sun's come up we've got you know traffic we're starting to deal with i-20 it's it's it's we're really trying to work our way across the country at this point and as soon as we get to shreveport i mean i'm looking at the clock and i'm just stunned because i've made this trip from atlanta to dallas so many times and shreveport is at the end of a long day but we're there and it's you know it's noon so at this point we have to then hook up 49 and go up to texarkana and as we're getting on we find ourselves right behind a cop in an suv it was frustrating because it was the fastest section of the whole drive and we couldn't pass him thankfully though he was going at about 100 miles an hour so we just tucked in maybe a mile half a mile behind him enough to see him but not enough that we'd draw attention to ourselves for pacing him and just cruised with him for a while so let me tell you about how cannonball gas stops work you land at your pump co-driver jumps out puts the card in pulls the pump sticks it in and as soon as you stick that pump in you get that gas flowing you run in you go to the bathroom you come back out you tend to the pump and as soon as you're done you pull it driver hops out you get in you switch you go you're maximizing every single second at a gas stop when you do this in this case we had to buy beer so we rolled into the gas station with 102 average and ran in and i grabbed the coors and one of the other teams had bought out all of the coors banquet beer so we had to settle for coors light i know i know we should be disqualified and slapped a 20 down on the thing and asked the girl how many people have come to get beer so far today she's like yeah a lot of them and they were all in a hurry i'm like great keep the change bye and ran back out to the car and it was uh done fueling and then dave had to go to the bathroom so i run in and i stand in front of the toilet and i start to go and as i'm going it was like the hands of the gastrointestinal gods came down and just twisted my lower intestines and i'm like oh no not even wanting to risk anything at this point i immediately switch over to the stall with as much force as a pregnant woman giving birth to a 12 pound baby i've never gone to the bathroom this fast in my life and got myself back out there and as soon as i did doug was like man that took you kind of a while and i was like yeah you have no idea what i had to do but anyway we jumped back in the car and made our way back down the highway thankfully the louisiana highway patrolman had turned around and found somewhere else to go so we were able to really crank on the way back south and then promptly ran into saturday traffic it was much more work even when ed and i set the cannonball record we had a lot of traffic you know during the day time during the cannonball but in this case it was just even that much worse and some of these states like mississippi louisiana the drivers there's not really an awareness for staying in the you know right lane or it's just kind of all over the place a lot of slow drivers it just gets congested it's really tough we made our way through the traffic as best we could because we were starting to get really competitive everybody else was finishing or was close to finishing and posting their averages and so we kind of knew where we were at the problem with doing cannonballs is you always get caught especially if you're in kind of a flashy car with people trying to street race you especially mustangs and that's incredibly dangerous there was this black and yellow mustang that was trying to race us for the longest time and we finally got away from him and then we had to stop for gas and then we caught back up to him so we had to get away from him again but before we could even do that there was a silver toyota camry with a bumper like half falling off and the guy just kind of texting and all that this was a big concern that a lot of people you know are seen as kind of passing by and these other people are being ridiculous in the way they're driving we're keeping it smooth we're not doing really hard passes on people working our way through but these guys are just chasing us and they're in these ridiculous this the mustang was this ridiculous color so we finally got ahead of them and this camry would not get off our tail every move we made he would follow us and we even ashamed to admit it but we made a few aggressive moves we'll say just to try to get away from this guy because it's one thing to drive aggressively with somewhat professional drivers and a very capable car like a porsche where you know exactly what the car can do it's a whole nother thing to do it with somebody else who really doesn't care and doesn't have the proper equipment who's trying to keep up with you the best way i can describe this is if the devil was designing a perfect place in hell for a car guy it would be that he'd have you race a camry in a porsche 911 and always lose and finally lost him but this probably took about an hour to get ahead of this camry but that was probably the most eventful part of it we didn't see a whole lot of cops other than the the couple we were stuck behind or a couple decent speed traps uh but the other guys on the run had uh run so well that they hadn't really stirred up the hornet's nest for us it starts to get into the later afternoon and there's this point on i-20 that i love i mean i've made this trip from my family's home in texas all the time and nothing is more satisfying than when you crest the hill it's around lithia springs and uh you just sort of crest and you look down and there's the skyline of atlanta and that was the most amazing sight this time to crest that and know that we were almost home i was looking at ways and looking at directions and man it was about to do this stuff to us again it was going to do send us through people's you know living rooms to get us back to where we're going but i knew that the actual route is to actually hit 75 and there's actually an exit for the amphitheater fairgrounds and we were able to you know i had override ways in my navigation at this point and we kind of flipped up over looped ourselves in landed the parking lot hit the time and hopped out with our beer and took our pictures and sent it to the group you know we didn't believe we had actually won or did anything well because there was another team that was actually looking like they had had a really amazing time there was a number of teams this run who are very capable and very fast who were sub 15 hours as well but the one team that we thought had beat us handily because of the updates they had posted forgot that there was a time change between georgia and texas in their calculations so they posted an hour faster than they actually were so we had no idea that we won this thing we thought we were just coming in for second maybe third place and we posted our time to the group and everyone goes congrats you did it again all that like what are you talking about and then fred ashmore who's a previous winner and record holder texted us and said yeah the time to beat's 1405. like what i looked at dave i'm like dave i i think we won this was a really fun race uh it didn't have the big gravitas of a cannonball or setting a cannonball record which is kind of a lifelong dream but i think the homage to the movie that i loved uh to the whole idea this crazy idea of just running to texarkana for a six pack of beer and back really made this just kind of whimsical and fun so we popped open the coors and celebrated in the cold parking lot with ourselves and one other team that had just come in as well and uh yeah it was a cold lonely celebration like most cannonball type events so from from a record standpoint i think it's pretty cool but you know i mean from an adventure standpoint it's right up there with everything i love to do [Music] you

Channel: VINwiki

Views: 228,866

Rating: 4.9364305 out of 5

Keywords: Doug Tabbutt, Dave Black, Ed Bolian, Arne Toman, Taylor Hull, Bandit Run, Atlanta, Texarkana, vinwiki, car stories, porsche, 991, carrera 4, race, burt reynolds, smokey and the bandit

Id: efpV3Ad6mz8

Length: 15min 54sec (954 seconds)

Published: Thu May 06 2021