We set an UNBEATABLE Cannonball Record

guys guys watch out i just got my doors blown off by a cop car heading to california when the lockdown came honestly i just wanted to go out and drive not only because the roads were empty but also because people said well you shouldn't do that it's unsafe i promised my wife that i wouldn't do any more cannonballing after 27 25 and i stuck to that promise but i was certainly begging because i had been on a number of essential trips and i saw how empty the roads were and just how much joy it brought me to drive when there was nobody else on the road and nobody hogging the left lane it was like all of the karen's had stayed home and they were the same people who sit and park in the left lane and never never move over so it's a truly awesome experience being out on the road and just driving fast everywhere so i got to watch two other teams make runs the ones that i had helped scout and both of them were in imminent danger of taking our record and it was certainly a little bit of a stressful time very emotional time for me i wanted to see somebody that i knew and respected carry the torch take the record but i certainly didn't want it to happen that quickly those two guys didn't end up beating the record so i was able to to go to sleep that sunday night but then we got a message that somebody else that we had never heard of was closing in on our record and was about to beat it and they certainly did some of you heard about the 2638 story and the the borrowed audi and it was certainly hard to accept that that was how it had gone down just because there was no traffic and no cops somebody jumped in a car and went out and beat our time especially after we had spent so much time and effort and poured emotion and years of planning into beating ed's record so after my mercedes got wrecked on april 4th i was pretty heartbroken uh but i did think that maybe god was telling me like you're kind of done with this whole cannonball thing just when i thought that i had uh come to grips and made my peace with being retired and just seeing the record go away my wife sends me a text message and she essentially said who am i to impose my ethics on you if you were doing this with a clear conscience and i think this actually is safe to do when there's nobody else on the road and i don't like how you kind of lost the record and if you want to make a run during the quarantine you have my blessing and i'm like great now you say it i can't call your bluff arnie's car got wrecked what the heck am i gonna do now so i called up barney and said all right i've got permission how are we gonna come up with a car as traffic is starting to mount people are not following the whole quarantine thing so we had to do something quick and the quickest alternative was troy's corvette that he had run in the cannonball a couple times and doug bought it so he sends it to me to kind of go through it and make sure that it's ready to go we had about a week's worth of work we had to do to it i took the car out on the monday before we were supposed to go and realize that there is no way that i'm driving this fiberglass sports car across the country at those speeds i just it just didn't feel right and i knew i had to go back to the german sedan so i knew that my buddy eric had this audi s6 that had some mild work done to it that he had promised that he would sell me when he was done with it so i called him on tuesday morning and i said eric i gotta level with you i need to make another run my mercedes is wrecked and i need to buy your car and he's like well you're in luck i just bought a gtr and i'm looking to sell it i said i'll be there in 30 minutes so i picked the thing up at noon on tuesday and the three-day cannonball build began in cannonball my favorite part is building the car and preparing which in this circumstance were both out the window so the build of this car was going to be like a reality show where you build it in a few days but in this reality show we were actually going to build it in a few days so the car is a hodgepodge of cannonball cars that i had we stripped all of the countermeasures off my ford ltd that we were going to run in the c2c express in 2019 we robbed the fuel system out of the e63 we took the electronic stack out of the corvettes we took the cb antenna and a couple other odds and ends off of my crown vic from the 2904 and in a few days we had ourselves a cannonball car so what's funny about the audi s6 is it was actually the car that i wanted to build in the first place before the mercedes but seeing that ams did not have a bunch of parts for the s6 like they did the e63 i wanted to run a full alpha packaged car and at the time they didn't do tuning and really only had a couple parts so that's why i chose the e63 but the reason i wanted to do the s6 is it can kind of be disguised as a ford taurus so seeing we were pretty late in the whole quarantine thing we are already into may the traffic was already really picked up and really the only advantage we were going to have would be leaving manhattan at any time we wanted so the plan was to leave at 6 00 pm and get through denver before 8 a.m the next morning here we go to new york i called in uh my former co-driver dunadell who ran with me in the c2c in ultra beige and helped me win the 2018 run uh because berkeley was unavailable and dunadale was absolutely ready to go waiting for the call my cannonball story started uh in about middle school when i read about alex roy's record and then progressed when ed's record broke in 2013. i remember vividly meeting uh doug tabit out of cars and coffee in cleveland it was a july 4th i remember correctly and essentially we were drawn to each other by both of us having antennas and screens in our cars my gli and his corvette were both very reminiscent of of vehicles we had seen and looked up to you know alex's m5 and ed's cl all vehicles that we uh you know strive to to emulate almost doug and ice became fast friends and maintained a good friendship over the past next couple years and it really blossomed when doug tapped me to be his co-driver in the monte carlo now dubbed ultra beige for the 2017 c2c express of course that run ended rather haphazardly in indiana on the side of the road at a transmission shop of all places and then we progressed to 2018 of course finishing also heartbreaking but still winning in ultra beige and then moving on to 2019 unfortunately when doug and arnie were looking for a third co-pilot i was unable to make it i was starting a job that week and i decided to you know pass the torch and and uh and i gave the opportunity which of course the 2019 c2c became a trial run for the 2725 rum later that year in the e63 so as soon as i heard that doug arney and berkeley had set the record i was ecstatic but also part of me was had a little bit of a heartstring pull and i felt that you know the next opportunity i got to you know if anything ever happened i would be lining up at doug's door in arnie's door to be the third man and lo and behold as soon as 26 38 came out i remember calling doug and said when are we going when are we going and he sort of said well gotta talk to my wife and whatnot a few days later i got the call and and we were we were headed to new york it was eerie in new york city because there's no cars but there was people and bikes everywhere and the the new risk was driving through an intersection even if you had a green light you might have bicyclists just running the red lights it was like there was there's no traffic laws anymore you know cars didn't have the right of way so that presented a new challenge but because of the lack of traffic we were able to make it out of manhattan in four and a half minutes and got stuck at one red light and that annoyed us which is crazy because usually manhattan is just you're stopped all the way out so we quickly got up to speed and we're on the way honestly it almost felt too easy like it didn't even feel like this was even gonna count because up to then we had you know no problems at all we had an incredible team of scouts lined up that had our backs that wanted to see us get the record and that helped us out in pennsylvania because we came up on two pa state troopers in short succession and thankfully we had just passed one of our scouts so we called them and said hey we need you to come take one for the team because we had no idea how long we might be stuck behind him and so he came flying up and got ready to pass one of them and the trooper got off at the exit so we took off again five minutes later gets stuck behind another one call him up hey it's your time so he comes flying up and gets ready to pass him again and he turns around in the median so thankfully we didn't have to pay his ticket for him but we were able to continue on and not get stuck behind the troopers for a while because that can certainly take a lot of time off so across the midwest we were hauling that that was where we had a couple of 125 mile an hour averages across multiple states and we were able to get our average to denver up to 120 which is exactly where we needed to be to be sub 26 hours so one of the biggest problems with this car is at 160 miles an hour there's this crazy like air buffeting like whining noise that you just can't drive faster than that or otherwise it'll drive you crazy so that definitely kept our top speed down so at no point did we exceed 175 miles an hour we got to about iowa had a hiccup i i honestly thought we were done i had wanted to get michelin pilot 4s tires but they were on back order so we settled on the continental extreme dws which was a great idea if we had done the run in april but we were in may now and it was super hot out and so they were a little bit spongy for performance driving in warm weather all of a sudden the car was just like super vague and almost uncontrollable i'd like turn the wheel to to change lanes and i'd turn back and there'd be like a delay and then there's this vibration in the front end and it was just it was all over the board and i'm like i mean it's got to be tires it feels like tires that have just gone completely to crap or like when you overheat your tires on the track and they're done the heat cycle and they're just like you're just all over the board that's what it felt like i'm like there's no way these tires are that bad but maybe maybe that's it that's got to be it arnie was asleep in the back and i told donado i'm like i think we just gotta like try to let some air out of the tires like maybe that'll help and give us a little more grip but in the back of my mind i'm going this is crazy if if they're this shot already we're never going to make it through the mountain pass i mean we're like 1200 miles into the run my gut just sank because i'm like we're done this is not gonna work this is a band-aid and arnie woke up and he's like what the heck is going on why are you going 60 miles an hour i'm like this car is awful it's got a mind of its own and i literally just like took the wheel and did this and just kind of like threw the car and it did this it went back and forth both directions he's like man that's crazy what is wrong and i'm like i have no freaking idea this car is driving itself and he's like wait a minute do you have the uh the like lane change assist thing on i'm like i don't know what's that and he's like there's there's a icon on the dash it like has the the two lanes i'm like yeah that's on he's like you that's what the vibration is every time you get to the the lanes is giving you a vibration it's trying to put you back into the lane i'm like oh my goodness so it took us probably 10 minutes to try to figure out how to turn this darn thing off and we finally got it turned off and we're on our way but that was our big moment of like we're done this ain't gonna happen and it was all just to my idiocy and lack of understanding with technology because the newest car i own is a 2000 mercedes and has heated seats and rain sensing wipers ooh so to me in canon balling the most important thing is safety and just like the 2725 run we weren't passing people at excessive speeds there was no passing on the shoulder and a lot of people are dumbfounded you know they think it's like the movies like it's a real life dukes of hazard or something which it's far less dramatic than that and given the less traffic it was uh it was quite a bit easier arnie is a master of disguise the e63 was awesome the s6 was awesomer because it sort of looked like a patrol car however i'm not sure which was a better disguise because the e63 became known as the silver passenger car because that's what was described over the scanner when we got called in in iowa perfect could be anybody however the s6 while it probably kept us from getting called in multiple times because people mistook it for a police car it bit us when we got called in in colorado because the person was incredibly descriptive and even called out the unit number and all he knew it was an audi dressed up to look like a patrol car and that's what came over the scanner so we're like well there's no mistaking that they are looking for us so arnie's driving i'm frantically looking for a way around because we heard the cop report back and he goes yeah i'm at m4 such and such i'll i'll be waiting for him so i'm going all right we got to get off on surface streets there's like 13 miles to the border of utah so let's just take surface streets to get around this and and get there so i'm looking at the map i'm trying to figure out where the cop said he was going to be and i finally realized that you know when they called us in they reported us at mile marker 18. we were moving so quickly that by the time it came over the scanner transmission we were at mile marker 13 and we had already passed the cop in the median that had said he was waiting for us so i figured that out and i'm like arnie friggin hammer down let's make it to the border there's nothing between here and there so we did we got out clean we're good to go the traffic the the situation we ran into in california was horrendous and despite having spotters ahead of us and and people trying to you know give us a hand you know there was no moment as ed always says there's there was a moment where you could have set the cruise control and beat the record in california but we were never had that moment we never had that moment where you know we had these moving targets we never had the chance to just put our foot down and and know that we were going to be the fastest time we knew we were up there we didn't know that we were going to be the fastest time the disguise proved to be effective though because one of our scouts that led us through nevada right as we get to the california border we pass him and he's on the phone with us the whole time and he's like guys guys watch out i just got my doors blown off by a cop car heading to california and we're like um no that's that's we just passed you he's like no no no no there's a cop car just flying south he's going towards california you guys better watch out and this is a car guy right he should know better and we're like no that was us we just passed you we're that car he's like oh okay to me the run was momentous being part of a team that was able to achieve such a feat in such dire circumstances was incredible part of the reason i wanted to do a covid run was everybody who cannonballs wants to know what it would be like to do the ultimate run the perfect situation the perfect car and the perfect team i found the perfect co-driver in arnie and the car was just about as good as it gets and there was no traffic and that was just so much fun because on the 2725 run we're battling with all of the normal circumstances the traffic you know the left lane drivers and there was just nobody on the roads and it was a lot of fun to be able to cruise at 140 160 miles an hour and not be bothering anybody so on sunday afternoon we pulled into the portofino we had traveled 2816 miles in 25 hours and 39 minutes with an overall average speed of 110 miles an hour across the whole country the feeling pulling in for once we actually had people there we weren't pulling up in in the middle of the night there were some people there to to greet us and to to film us coming in but uh you know i gotta say that it just didn't have the same feeling as 2725 when we had done 2725 it was more about doing something that you know that that hadn't been done and was possibly couldn't be done and 2539 uh while it cements us as the fastest to ever cross the country it just didn't feel the same this run had quite a different feeling than 27.25 for that run there was really no blueprint and the record had stood for so long that it just it had a sense of accomplishment that was far greater than this for 25 39 everybody knew that this was the time to do it you know you had so much less to overcome so much less traffic so so much fewer cops so while it's a great achievement it just doesn't have the same impact to me as 2725 did [Music] [Applause] [Music] do [Music] you

Channel: VINwiki

Views: 2,241,774

Rating: 4.8799744 out of 5

Keywords: Cannonball Run, Arne Toman, Doug Tabbutt, Mercedes, Mercedes-Benz, E63, AMG, E63S, cannonballing, trucker, countermeasures, damage, accident, crash, salvage, vinwiki, car stories, Illinois, Chicago, Vehicle History, Carfax, police, scouting, audi, s6, apr, ams, v8, tt, ford taurus, police interceptor, p71

Id: GOWn1WSYhVQ

Length: 18min 38sec (1118 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 20 2020

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