Confessions Of A Cannonballer...

~JM~ · Jun 23, 2016

Slow link to open, but cool car & story.

http://www.powerperformancenews.com/features/confessions-of-a-cannonballer/

INEEDAGN · Jun 25, 2016

Rich people still do that kind of stuff. In Charlotte for the 2014 power tour we were passed like we were standing still by several high end cars wrapped with logos and sponsors and chase vehicles, so we googled it and found that we were seeing the gumball 3000 rally. The US leg went from Florida to New York and there was a checkpoint in Charlotte. We were headed to the NASCAR hall of fame and when we got there we discovered that was the checkpoint! It was filled with six and seven figure supercars, many with european license plates. The entrance fee to the rally was $80,000. I might have pictures but I think they were lost when my phone took a dump.

I don't doubt that the shelby in the article is real but I'm highly skeptical when they get to the part about false 55 radar reading technology etc.

INEEDAGN · Jun 25, 2016

http://v2lab.com/blog/gumball-3000-charlotte-checkpoint/

Looking back I gotta admit how freaking lucky we were, what are the odds of going to a Gumball 3000 checkpoint as the cars are rolling in and not even know about it?

Sorry if this is off topic

~JM~ · Jun 25, 2016

http://www.caranddriver.com/columns/brock-yates-even-the-cops-liked-the-cannonball-column

Even the Cops Liked the Cannonball

NOV 2002

BY BROCK YATES

A couple of months ago I received a phone call of a type that is common to ink-stained wretches in this trade. A young graduate student was preparing a thesis in his field of study-motion-picture history-and was seeking information on the madness I composed over 20 years ago called The Cannonball Run. This seemed odd, considering the fact that the old flick has long since descended into late-night limbo and video and DVD sales.

Moreover, the whole movie thing has never been a source of great pride for me, in that Burt Reynolds, who starred in the picture, butchered the original script I had written for the late Steve McQueen, and the result, while a massive moneymaker, was lashed by the critics. But like the old joke about Pierre the Bridge Builder, The Cannonball Run is indelibly inscribed on my so-called career portfolio, and few conversations with strangers pass without the subject of the picture arising.

But the conversation with the student took a strange turn. Although he insisted the picture is a cult favorite among his fellow students, he had no idea The Cannonball Run was based on a real event; that five actual Cannonball races were run between 1971 and 1979, with all manner of incidents in the picture based on fact. I explained to him that three guys actually ran disguised as priests (a modest sin, considering the firestorm that has descended on the Catholic Church recently) and that myself; the movie's director, Hal Needham; my wife, Pamela; and a Los Angeles radiologist named Lyle Royer drove the same ambulance used in the movie to compete in the last Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash in April 1979.

Here was a kid practically young enough to be my grandson, waxing eloquent over a movie he could recite line for line, yet he had no idea its genesis arose from the real stories behind it. As the saying goes, truth is stranger than fiction. But only when the reality has not been subsumed by foamy legends and fantasies that radiate outward from the actual event.

Now, 23 years after the last Cannonball was run, the whole wacky affair is coming back to life. Within weeks, Motorbooks International will publish Cannonball! World's Greatest Outlaw Road Race. Because I was the founder of the races, I served as a sort of trail boss of the book and managed to herd 37 of my co-conspirators to write their own recollections. These "usual suspects" include Dan Gurney, with whom I won the 1971 race; Cobra designer Peter Brock (one of the "priests"); edgy Indianapolis journalist Robin Miller; director Needham; Amelia Island Concours impresario Bill Warner; our own Fred Gregory; La Carrera Panamericana organizer Loyal Truesdale (who with a pal ran the Cannonball in 1979 on a motorcycle); and other notables. Their stories are universally riveting and often hilarious.

About the time you read this, Pamela and I will embark on a coast-to-coast book tour driving a Jaguar XK8, the modern counterpart to the 1979 version that holds the cross-country record at 32 hours and 51 minutes.

Within hours of the Cannonball book going to press, a wonderful footnote surfaced. It was triggered, oddly enough, in the carriage house of our home in upstate New York. Barry Meguiar, the well-known, widely respected owner of the splendid line of Meguiar's car-care products, came to Wyoming to tape Car Crazy-his half-hour show on the automotive hobby he hosts on the Speed Channel.

Surrounded by my two Eliminator hot rods, old and new, and my old Cannonball Dodge Challenger that is a veteran of two Cannonballs (1972 and 1975), the interview inevitably turned to those legendary races and the madness surrounding them.

I noted that the 130-mph, Bill Mitchell-modified, Dick Landy 440 Dodge ambulance we used in 1979 was in fact the vehicle used by Reynolds, Dom DeLuise, Jack Elam, and Farrah Fawcett in the movie and that the scene in which they were stopped was a near-verbatim repeat of the near-arrest of Needham and me on Interstate 80 in the Garden State. I mused to Barry that for more than 20 years I have wondered if the two cops who stopped us ever found out about the scam.

At that point, Meguiar turned to the camera and asked that if either officer were watching, he should contact Meguiar headquarters in Irvine, California. A neat idea, I thought, but was convinced that nobody would surface.

I was wrong. Within hours of the show's airing, a friend of one of the officers called Meguiar and hooked us up with now-retired Bergen County Police Department deputy chief Marc Fenech. During a four-way conference call with Fenech, Needham, Meguiar, and myself, it was revealed that Fenech and (now) police chief Jack Schmidig were on drug patrol on the night of April 1, 1979 when I-who was driving at the time-tore past them at somewhere between 95 and 100 mph.

"Actually, we weren't on speed-enforcement patrol," recalled Fenech, "but your speed got our attention, and we began to follow. Then you kept going past exits leading to nearby hospitals. When you drove by the last one for another 50 miles, we stopped you."

Fenech, a car nut and regular reader of this magazine who has two Vipers in his garage, recalled the entire incident with grand humor. "We let you go after the 'doctor' told us the 'patient' [Lady Pamela], a 'senator's wife,' could not be flown in a pressurized cabin and had to be driven to California-although we wondered later why you didn't ship her by train.

"Actually, I didn't think any more about the incident until Jack called me up after reading a story about Yates and the movie in People magazine. He said, 'Marc, we've been had.'"

Although some victims of such a ruse might take umbrage and refuse to discuss it, both Fenech and Schmidig recall the incident with great amusement and have told their story hundreds of times over the years. "It's one of those things in a career that you never forget," said Fenech during the call.

I guess Marc's like the rest of us who played roles, large and small, in those outrageous convulsions of motorsport called the Cannonballs. Now comes the book, and yes, serious discussions about yet another movie-the seventh-dealing with the races that began in idle conversation and general paranoia (a common malady in the '70s) over the rising power of Ralph Nader.

There will probably never be another race like it. (I say probably.) But damn, it was fun. You had to have been there.