The story of the real Cannonball Run

The race had the standard mantra: get from start to finish as quickly as possible. But this was no organised and sanitised meet in the controlled environs of a racetrack, cars lapping a looped skein of bitumen, high-vis-wearing safety marshals at the ready, beer-buzzed fans agawp wearing logos of petrol producers and oil companies. This was underground. Outside the law. Almost invisible except for a few knowing people, the participants themselves, and those who witnessed a road-borne UFO: a flash of blue and a roaring engine along a sun-scarred American highway.

You could call Brock Yates a straight shooter. As long-time executive editor of Car and Driver in the ’70s, a magazine still published today, and a broadcaster, he was known as being bold and outspoken, if not notorious – a man who said exactly what was on his mind.

Brock conceived the Cannonball as a celebration of the great American highway as much as a protest against, what he perceived to be, the increasing loss of personal freedoms in America. This included the ‘oppression’ of enforced speed limits. What better protest than to flout the rules with wanton abandon? The original Cannonball tales of the real-life event, written by Brock himself, would be published in Car and Driver. Other publications – including Sports Illustrated, The New York Times, even Australia’s Modern Motor – featured the race over the years, and writers from Road & Track, Motor Trend, Playboy, Hot Rod and others even actively participated.

While the race’s motivation can be found at the intersection of political protest, a love for automobiles and a celebration of America’s freedoms, its inspiration is one Erwin George ‘Cannon Ball’ Baker. Erwin, a vaudeville performer who also raced motorcycles and automobiles, was most famous for point-to-point drives and rides. So regarded was he for these feats of endurance that he made a living from them. At a time when marketing was word-of-mouth and myth-peddling, vehicle manufacturers would pay Edwin handsomely to make dangerous journeys and prove the performance and reliability of the machines they made – scoring much-desired newspaper space in the process.

Dan Gurney and Brock Yates won the first Cannonball Baker Sea-To-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash in this Ferrari, travelling from New York City to Redondo Beach, California, in 35 hours and 54 minutes. Gurney said, “We never exceeded 175 miles an hour.”

The race – or as some preferred to call it, the ‘event’ – was run five times in the 1970s. The only rules were the agreed points of departure and arrival, plus seemingly obvious things like that you needed to travel in some sort of car. You were required to follow a few informal ‘gentlemen’s agreements’, too, such as driving the single vehicle the entire way, not transporting the entrant vehicle on another vehicle (presumably something fast with wings and jet engines) and not having a second, identical car to jump into near the finish line.

The first recorded Brock Yates Cannonball Run was in 1971 and completed in, surprisingly, a Dodge van named the Moon Trash II, which looked more like a souped-up Scooby-Doo van than a supercar. This run was a precursor to the first race, in which “six outlandish vehicles, manned by 16 even more outlandish drivers, co-drivers, navigators, mechanics – and a TWA stewardess, for God’s sake – scattered out of the Red Ball Garage on East 31st Street in New York City and headed west”.

A host of high-performance entrants followed, and Brock Yates was never far away from the action, either as a runner-up participant or as a driver in a winning team. Everything from Ferraris to motorhomes took part in the Cannonball. The official record sits at 32 hours and 51 minutes (an average speed of 87mph, or 140km/h) by Dave Heinz and Dave Yarborough aboard a Jaguar XJS in the final run, April 1979.

This last Cannonball, in 1979, was fraught with tension. Brock Yates got into a row with his friend and boss David E Davis, who wanted him to run no more Cannonballs, and Brock was fired. So Car and Driver did not report on nor support the finale.

With the elements of speed and a healthy disregard for road rules combining, it would seem the race was forever on the cusp of catastrophe. In fact, the worst recorded mishap is the moment a lasagne was spilled in an RV that was taking on the journey. This RV completed the Cannonball in 57 hours – a little off the pace.

It says something of the lingering innocence of the ’70s that three guys ran the race disguised as Catholic priests and hoodwinked police in the process. And the ambulance featured in the first ever Cannonball Run film is the actual vehicle Brock Yates himself used in the final 1979 run – to confuse authorities and fly across the highway undetected. Brock was also at the centre of another notable ruse: he dressed up as a doctor and convinced a police officer, who had just pulled the car over, that the patient (in fact his wife, Pamela) was a senator’s wife who had to drive, not fly, because she couldn’t travel in the pressurised cabin of an aircraft.

After Brock fell out with his friend David E Davis, he had the last laugh. In 1980 he, along with Hal Needham, started production on the hugely successful 1981 film Cannonball Run, the first in a famous trilogy made in the 1980s featuring Burt Reynolds (whose role was originally to be played by none other than Steve McQueen), John Candy, Dean Martin, Farrah Fawcett, Sammy Davis Jr, Dom DeLuise, Jackie Chan and more. As entertaining as the movies are, an old adage rings true: the truth here is stranger than fiction. Brock has written a book, Cannonball!, and the story is also about to be told in a documentary due for release in 2018. As Brock said in one of his many subsequent, retrospective articles in Car and Driver: “You had to have been there.” We wish we were.

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