Exactly 35 years ago, a little nuclear warhead dropped onto the automotive pop culture world. Look hard, and you can still see the mushroom cloud.
The first rumblings of the pending explosion, now remembered simply as the Cannonball, actually began a few months earlier, in May of 1971, with a reconnaissance run from New York to Los Angeles in a Dodge van. Automotive journalist Brock Yates and crew, mentally weary from the early but prevailing attitude of political correctness, but still a couple of years away from the national 55-mph speed limit, wanted to prove that "good drivers in good automobiles could employ the American Interstate system the same way the Germans were using their Autobahns," he wrote. "Yes, make high-speed travel by car a reality! Truth and justice affirmed by an overtly legal act."
When Yates sobered up, it still seemed like a good idea. Thus was born the original Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash, named in honor of Erwin G. "Cannon Ball" Baker, who made 143 trips across America, beginning in 1914 when he crossed the country in 14 days riding an Indian motorcycle on dirt roads. He died in 1960. Lawyers suggested changing "Cannon Ball" to "Cannonball" was enough to protect Yates from any angry descendants Baker may have left behind.
Yates' initial one-Dodge-van run of 2,858 miles was made in 40 hours, 51 minutes, fueled by 315 gallons of gas and 12 packets of Vivarin. Average speed: 70 mph.
But then came a telegram that changed everything. "This constitutes formal entry by the Polish Racing Drivers of America in the next official Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash. The drivers are Oscar Kovaleski, Brad Niemcek and Tony Adamowicz. If we can find California, we'll beat you fair and square."
Game on.
More entries arrived. But as the November 15, 1971 start date approached, lots of those entries dropped out. Yates was left with eight, including three vans — one driven by the Polish Racing Drivers of America — plus a huge Travco motor home, an American Motors AMX, an MGB GT and a Cadillac Sedan de Ville, driven by three guys from Boston who had answered a classified ad placed by the Cadillac's elderly owner: he needed someone to deliver the Cadillac to California, but insisted the car not be driven over 75 mph, or in the dark. The Cadillac finished 3rd, average speed 79.3 mph, including stops totaling three hours and 15 minutes.
Gurney signs on
As for Yates himself, as the start time approached, it looked grim. Car dealer Kirk White had loaned Yates a pristine blue Ferrari Daytona for the race, but he had no co-driver. Legendary racer Dan Gurney was Yates' first choice, but he declined, as did drag racer "Big Daddy" Don Garlits and Formula 1 star Phil Hill. But then, a day before the race, Gurney called. "Is the invitation still open?"
"Absolutely," Yates said.
"I'll be there tomorrow."
Gurney flew in from California, carrying a little bag with a shaving kit and a change of underwear. Why had he changed his mind? "I remember there was something going on in his life then that upset him," Yates, now 73, recalls. "But I don't remember what it was."
Gurney does. His father-in-law had been diagnosed with a very aggressive type of throat cancer. He did not have long. Gurney's wife, Evi, was at her father's bedside in Europe. She told her father about the Cannonball, and that Gurney had declined. "Why?" her father said. "Life is so short. Tell Dan to do it."
"That changed everything," Gurney, 75, says now. Originally, he declined because "if things went all haywire, it would be bad not just for me, but racing in general." Now, that did not seem so important.
Green flag drops
November 15, 1971, the teams gathered at the Red Ball Garage in Manhattan, the regular parking garage for Yates' then-employer, Car and Driver magazine. As the midnight starting time approached, Yates and Gurney stocked up on provisions: Swiss cheese, Hershey bars, Gatorade and vitamin C.
Then it began. Gurney was driving. "I drove the first 18 hours," he says. "I started out right at the speed limit, out of Manhattan, into Jersey and Pennsylvania. I was trying to hone a sixth-sense police detector. We had no radar detectors, no radios, nothing. I realized after that 18 hours that I was expending 85 percent of my energy trying to detect speed traps and such."
Gurney first explored the Daytona's true capability in central Pennsylvania when a 20-something in a Camaro needed to be taught a lesson. "He was cruising at 100 mph," Yates wrote in his book Cannonball!. "Gurney watched him sail past, then accelerated to keep pace. I knew he wouldn't let the Camaro stay ahead. He opened the throttle plates on the Ferrari's 12 carburetor throats, and the big car clawed ahead, gobbling up the distance between it and the Camaro. We rocketed past. The engine noise increased slightly, but hardly to objectionable levels. The Camaro's headlights dwindled in the distance. 'That's 150, just as steady as you please,' said Gurney. Then he laughed."
"It was an intense, hard ride," Yates says. "We got into some horrible weather. Thank goodness for Gurney. What a driver. I would have ended up deep in the woods." Neither slept much. "Too much adrenalin."
Glare ice on a bridge: Gurney hit it at 125 mph, somehow saved it, because he's Dan Gurney.
Then, in Arizona, a cop in a mud-brown Dodge saw them pass, and gave chase, finally catching the Ferrari at a gas stop. He wrote Gurney a $90 ticket, then asked, "Just how fast will that thing go?"
"C'mon out on the highway, and we'll let you find out," Gurney wisecracked. Soon after, the thought occurred that they really didn't know how fast the Ferrari would go, so they found out: 172 mph.
The finish
They arrived at the Portofino Inn in Redondo Beach, California, on November 17, 1971, just 35 hours and 54 minutes after leaving the Red Ball Garage 2,876 miles ago. With stops, average speed was 80.8 mph. Inside the winning Ferrari, road maps and a tape recorder joined the breakfast and lunch and dinner of champions: Hershey bars and Gatorade. Dan Gurney preferred Swiss cheese. Now part of Bruce McCaw's collection, the Ferrari makes frequent appearances at car shows. Gurney says it was offered to him at the time for $15,000, but he couldn't afford it.
The Polish Racing Drivers arrived in their Chevy van less than an hour later, in 2nd place. Twenty-two hours later, the Travco motor home showed up, in 7th place. The MGB broke down 600 miles into the trip.
Press coverage was not intense, but a few major publications such as Sports Illustrated and the Los Angeles Times took notice. It was to the Times that Gurney served up his now famous quote regarding the safety of the event: "At no time did we exceed 175 mph."
Thirty-five years later it's this drive that continues to define the Cannonball. Yates and Gurney flat out in that blue Ferrari remain the embodiment of the event in its original and purest form.
Round two
Exactly a year later, the Cannonball ran again, this time with 25 entries. Yates ran his now famous Dodge Challenger, finishing second to a Cadillac. The third run was in late April 1975, won by a Ferrari Dino that beat the record set by Yates and Gurney by one minute. That event was covered by Time magazine, making it impossible to ignore. Coupled with the release of some knock-off movies, including Death Race 2000, The Gumball Rally and a totally unauthorized Cannonball, it was no longer an insider-only event, and Yates lost interest, turning his attention to screenwriting for projects such as Smokey and the Bandit II.
But then Smokey director and Hollywood stuntman Hal Needham convinced Yates that a genuine Cannonball Run movie would be a good idea, so Yates wrote up a serious script for leading man Steve McQueen. Of course, McQueen got sick, and Burt Reynolds took over, and Yates remains to this day embarrassed by the smash-hit movie that resulted. Embarrassed, but rich.
The end
Prior to the 1981 movie, though, Yates and Needham decided to revive the Cannonball to, if nothing else, publicize the upcoming movie and generate some story angles. So on, appropriately, April Fool's Day, 1979, it ran again, this time with an ungainly and unmanageable 42 entries. Yates, new wife Pamela, Needham and a doctor named Lyle Royer competed in the legendary TransCon Medivac ambulance, with Pamela playing a patient with a serious lung disease who needed to get to California, but because of the disease, could not fly in a pressurized plane, this explaining why an ambulance was streaking across the country at 100 mph. It sort of worked, until the NASCAR-prepared engine ate the transmission.
All this, of course, made it into the Cannonball Run movie, which sort of took some liberties. In the real 1972 race, for instance, there was the three-woman team sponsored by the Right Bra Company who competed in a Cadillac limousine, at least until the driver fell asleep in Texas and the Caddy rolled over, showering the women inside with green Porta-Potty juice. Leading the three-woman team was motorsports journalist Judy Stropus, who now works in public relations for some top drag racing teams.
When the Cannonball Run movie came out, the rail-thin Stropus was replaced by the so-buxom Adrienne Barbeau, the three-woman team was now two women, and the Cadillac limo was a Lamborghini, but "a little editorial license never hurt anyone," Stropus recalls now.
And that 1979 Cannonball Run was the last. The event morphed into a slightly saner endurance competition called "One Lap of America," then morphed further into an even saner event that continues today, but allows competitors lots of time in nice motels.
There are, of course, bastard children, which annoy Yates to no end. The global spate of imitators "all seem to have 'ball' in the name," grouses Yates — "the Gumball, Redball, Fireball, Nutball, Goofball. I may have started it, but I can't stop it."
Yates remembers when he decided it was time for the original Cannonball to die. "It was time," he says. The highways were getting jammed up, the police had perfected radar, consumer watchdog and professional Yates critic Ralph Nader was at the peak of his influence, "and there were more and more guys in the race with fast cars who really didn't belong." Yates recalls visiting a wealthy sometime-racer in Florida who proudly showed him a brand-new Lamborghini he had just bought: "I'm going to win the next Cannonball in this," he told Yates.
"And I remember thinking, 'You ain't good enough to drive that car 180 mph across the country.' And at that point, I said it was over. I realized that sooner or later we were going to kill somebody. That was the main reason it ended."
Or is it?
Yates is, however, toying with the idea of running one more Cannonball, possibly in 2007, definitely with a very controlled, small list of invite-only competitors. "I'm thinking about it," Yates admits. But there are, he says, a lot of issues to address first, such as insurance and media coverage.
May be best to let the legend remain, Stropus says. "If Brock decided to revive the original format of the Cannonball I doubt that anyone participating would survive the journey. Girls dressed in pink in a Cadillac limousine, a carload of priests, a motor home complete with traveling chef — they'd probably draw way too much attention these days."
Adrienne Barbeau, though, may disagree.
The first rumblings of the pending explosion, now remembered simply as the Cannonball, actually began a few months earlier, in May of 1971, with a reconnaissance run from New York to Los Angeles in a Dodge van. Automotive journalist Brock Yates and crew, mentally weary from the early but prevailing attitude of political correctness, but still a couple of years away from the national 55-mph speed limit, wanted to prove that "good drivers in good automobiles could employ the American Interstate system the same way the Germans were using their Autobahns," he wrote. "Yes, make high-speed travel by car a reality! Truth and justice affirmed by an overtly legal act."
When Yates sobered up, it still seemed like a good idea. Thus was born the original Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash, named in honor of Erwin G. "Cannon Ball" Baker, who made 143 trips across America, beginning in 1914 when he crossed the country in 14 days riding an Indian motorcycle on dirt roads. He died in 1960. Lawyers suggested changing "Cannon Ball" to "Cannonball" was enough to protect Yates from any angry descendants Baker may have left behind.
Yates' initial one-Dodge-van run of 2,858 miles was made in 40 hours, 51 minutes, fueled by 315 gallons of gas and 12 packets of Vivarin. Average speed: 70 mph.
But then came a telegram that changed everything. "This constitutes formal entry by the Polish Racing Drivers of America in the next official Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash. The drivers are Oscar Kovaleski, Brad Niemcek and Tony Adamowicz. If we can find California, we'll beat you fair and square."
Game on.
More entries arrived. But as the November 15, 1971 start date approached, lots of those entries dropped out. Yates was left with eight, including three vans — one driven by the Polish Racing Drivers of America — plus a huge Travco motor home, an American Motors AMX, an MGB GT and a Cadillac Sedan de Ville, driven by three guys from Boston who had answered a classified ad placed by the Cadillac's elderly owner: he needed someone to deliver the Cadillac to California, but insisted the car not be driven over 75 mph, or in the dark. The Cadillac finished 3rd, average speed 79.3 mph, including stops totaling three hours and 15 minutes.
Gurney signs on
As for Yates himself, as the start time approached, it looked grim. Car dealer Kirk White had loaned Yates a pristine blue Ferrari Daytona for the race, but he had no co-driver. Legendary racer Dan Gurney was Yates' first choice, but he declined, as did drag racer "Big Daddy" Don Garlits and Formula 1 star Phil Hill. But then, a day before the race, Gurney called. "Is the invitation still open?"
"Absolutely," Yates said.
"I'll be there tomorrow."
Gurney flew in from California, carrying a little bag with a shaving kit and a change of underwear. Why had he changed his mind? "I remember there was something going on in his life then that upset him," Yates, now 73, recalls. "But I don't remember what it was."
Gurney does. His father-in-law had been diagnosed with a very aggressive type of throat cancer. He did not have long. Gurney's wife, Evi, was at her father's bedside in Europe. She told her father about the Cannonball, and that Gurney had declined. "Why?" her father said. "Life is so short. Tell Dan to do it."
"That changed everything," Gurney, 75, says now. Originally, he declined because "if things went all haywire, it would be bad not just for me, but racing in general." Now, that did not seem so important.
Green flag drops
November 15, 1971, the teams gathered at the Red Ball Garage in Manhattan, the regular parking garage for Yates' then-employer, Car and Driver magazine. As the midnight starting time approached, Yates and Gurney stocked up on provisions: Swiss cheese, Hershey bars, Gatorade and vitamin C.
Then it began. Gurney was driving. "I drove the first 18 hours," he says. "I started out right at the speed limit, out of Manhattan, into Jersey and Pennsylvania. I was trying to hone a sixth-sense police detector. We had no radar detectors, no radios, nothing. I realized after that 18 hours that I was expending 85 percent of my energy trying to detect speed traps and such."
Gurney first explored the Daytona's true capability in central Pennsylvania when a 20-something in a Camaro needed to be taught a lesson. "He was cruising at 100 mph," Yates wrote in his book Cannonball!. "Gurney watched him sail past, then accelerated to keep pace. I knew he wouldn't let the Camaro stay ahead. He opened the throttle plates on the Ferrari's 12 carburetor throats, and the big car clawed ahead, gobbling up the distance between it and the Camaro. We rocketed past. The engine noise increased slightly, but hardly to objectionable levels. The Camaro's headlights dwindled in the distance. 'That's 150, just as steady as you please,' said Gurney. Then he laughed."
"It was an intense, hard ride," Yates says. "We got into some horrible weather. Thank goodness for Gurney. What a driver. I would have ended up deep in the woods." Neither slept much. "Too much adrenalin."
Glare ice on a bridge: Gurney hit it at 125 mph, somehow saved it, because he's Dan Gurney.
Then, in Arizona, a cop in a mud-brown Dodge saw them pass, and gave chase, finally catching the Ferrari at a gas stop. He wrote Gurney a $90 ticket, then asked, "Just how fast will that thing go?"
"C'mon out on the highway, and we'll let you find out," Gurney wisecracked. Soon after, the thought occurred that they really didn't know how fast the Ferrari would go, so they found out: 172 mph.
The finish
They arrived at the Portofino Inn in Redondo Beach, California, on November 17, 1971, just 35 hours and 54 minutes after leaving the Red Ball Garage 2,876 miles ago. With stops, average speed was 80.8 mph. Inside the winning Ferrari, road maps and a tape recorder joined the breakfast and lunch and dinner of champions: Hershey bars and Gatorade. Dan Gurney preferred Swiss cheese. Now part of Bruce McCaw's collection, the Ferrari makes frequent appearances at car shows. Gurney says it was offered to him at the time for $15,000, but he couldn't afford it.
The Polish Racing Drivers arrived in their Chevy van less than an hour later, in 2nd place. Twenty-two hours later, the Travco motor home showed up, in 7th place. The MGB broke down 600 miles into the trip.
Press coverage was not intense, but a few major publications such as Sports Illustrated and the Los Angeles Times took notice. It was to the Times that Gurney served up his now famous quote regarding the safety of the event: "At no time did we exceed 175 mph."
Thirty-five years later it's this drive that continues to define the Cannonball. Yates and Gurney flat out in that blue Ferrari remain the embodiment of the event in its original and purest form.
Round two
Exactly a year later, the Cannonball ran again, this time with 25 entries. Yates ran his now famous Dodge Challenger, finishing second to a Cadillac. The third run was in late April 1975, won by a Ferrari Dino that beat the record set by Yates and Gurney by one minute. That event was covered by Time magazine, making it impossible to ignore. Coupled with the release of some knock-off movies, including Death Race 2000, The Gumball Rally and a totally unauthorized Cannonball, it was no longer an insider-only event, and Yates lost interest, turning his attention to screenwriting for projects such as Smokey and the Bandit II.
But then Smokey director and Hollywood stuntman Hal Needham convinced Yates that a genuine Cannonball Run movie would be a good idea, so Yates wrote up a serious script for leading man Steve McQueen. Of course, McQueen got sick, and Burt Reynolds took over, and Yates remains to this day embarrassed by the smash-hit movie that resulted. Embarrassed, but rich.
The end
Prior to the 1981 movie, though, Yates and Needham decided to revive the Cannonball to, if nothing else, publicize the upcoming movie and generate some story angles. So on, appropriately, April Fool's Day, 1979, it ran again, this time with an ungainly and unmanageable 42 entries. Yates, new wife Pamela, Needham and a doctor named Lyle Royer competed in the legendary TransCon Medivac ambulance, with Pamela playing a patient with a serious lung disease who needed to get to California, but because of the disease, could not fly in a pressurized plane, this explaining why an ambulance was streaking across the country at 100 mph. It sort of worked, until the NASCAR-prepared engine ate the transmission.
All this, of course, made it into the Cannonball Run movie, which sort of took some liberties. In the real 1972 race, for instance, there was the three-woman team sponsored by the Right Bra Company who competed in a Cadillac limousine, at least until the driver fell asleep in Texas and the Caddy rolled over, showering the women inside with green Porta-Potty juice. Leading the three-woman team was motorsports journalist Judy Stropus, who now works in public relations for some top drag racing teams.
When the Cannonball Run movie came out, the rail-thin Stropus was replaced by the so-buxom Adrienne Barbeau, the three-woman team was now two women, and the Cadillac limo was a Lamborghini, but "a little editorial license never hurt anyone," Stropus recalls now.
And that 1979 Cannonball Run was the last. The event morphed into a slightly saner endurance competition called "One Lap of America," then morphed further into an even saner event that continues today, but allows competitors lots of time in nice motels.
There are, of course, bastard children, which annoy Yates to no end. The global spate of imitators "all seem to have 'ball' in the name," grouses Yates — "the Gumball, Redball, Fireball, Nutball, Goofball. I may have started it, but I can't stop it."
Yates remembers when he decided it was time for the original Cannonball to die. "It was time," he says. The highways were getting jammed up, the police had perfected radar, consumer watchdog and professional Yates critic Ralph Nader was at the peak of his influence, "and there were more and more guys in the race with fast cars who really didn't belong." Yates recalls visiting a wealthy sometime-racer in Florida who proudly showed him a brand-new Lamborghini he had just bought: "I'm going to win the next Cannonball in this," he told Yates.
"And I remember thinking, 'You ain't good enough to drive that car 180 mph across the country.' And at that point, I said it was over. I realized that sooner or later we were going to kill somebody. That was the main reason it ended."
Or is it?
Yates is, however, toying with the idea of running one more Cannonball, possibly in 2007, definitely with a very controlled, small list of invite-only competitors. "I'm thinking about it," Yates admits. But there are, he says, a lot of issues to address first, such as insurance and media coverage.
May be best to let the legend remain, Stropus says. "If Brock decided to revive the original format of the Cannonball I doubt that anyone participating would survive the journey. Girls dressed in pink in a Cadillac limousine, a carload of priests, a motor home complete with traveling chef — they'd probably draw way too much attention these days."
Adrienne Barbeau, though, may disagree.
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