The Cannonball Run and the 1972 Cotton Owens Dodge Challenger
"Coast-to-Coast in 38.05 Hours"
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The Cannonball Run and the 1972 Dodge Challenger : Coast to Coast in 38.05 hours
Steve Behr and Brock Yates, New York; 1972 Dodge Challenger; 38 hours, 3 minutes; average speed, 76.3 mph:
"A dazzling dumb performance by not one but two former winners in a really good car. The Cotton Owens Challenger, which finished second in the 1972 event, was even better this year. Work by super builder-designer Ron Nash—suspension and brake modifications, a Holley 800-cfm carb, Crager headers, Goodrich T/A radials, transmission oil cooler and other trick parts plus prototype Cibie driving lights and an experimental Autotronics Super Snooper radar unit with a maximum range of five miles—made the car a quiet, sure-fire, 130-mph winner.
That was effectively nullified by a hectic departure (a fantastic collection of food was left at curbside, meaning a Coast-to Coast diet of M&Ms and Cokes) and a half-hour hideout behind a gas station after a trucker was heard broadcasting a description of the car to the Smokeys. Running behind schedule, route improvisations were made that lost even more time."
Brock Yates invented the Cannonball Run, which, before it became a silly movie, was an actual and very illegal high-speed road race across America's highways.
Yates was a writer for Car & Driver, when, in early 1971, he announced a coast-to-coast race from New York City to Redondo Beach, California. The race had one rule:
"All competitors will drive any vehicle of their choosing, over any route, at any speed they judge practical, between the starting point and destination. The competitor finishing with the lowest elapsed time is the winner."
If you think it sounds nutty, you're not the only one -- Yates himself, with two associates and his 15-year-old son, were the only team that showed up at the first race, but race they did. Yates wrote about his high-speed adventures in Car & Driver, and the next Cannonball Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash, seven months later, had eight entrants.
Additional Cannonball Runs were run in 1972, 1975, and 1979, the last with more than 40 racing teams. And winners received only a trophy, a "free-form sculpture" made of wrenches, hammers and pliers.
By the fifth race, though there had been no serious accidents, even Yates knew it was just a matter of time until something deadly brought his anarchist event to an end, so the Cannonball Run was quietly discontinued. The events' fastest time, for the trip from New York to California, was 32 hours and 51 minutes. Which, if you think about it, is a long way to go and a short time to get there.
Smokey and the Bandit was obviously Yates-inspired, and Yates co-wrote Smokey and the Bandit II. He also wrote the original Cannonball Run, and played himself, with dialogue like "You are certainly the most distinguished group of highway scofflaws and degenerates ever gathered together in one place."
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Please visit the following links where you can learn more about the history and legend of the Cannonball Run, Brock Yates, Dan Gurney, and The Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash
April 2005 - Car and Driver Reprint
http://www.caranddriver.com/article.asp?section_id=4&article_id=9536
First published in Car and Driver in March 1972.
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- HAPPY MOTORING! -
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