Cannonball: World's Greatest Outlaw Road Race Review

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Cannonball: World's Greatest Outlaw Road Race ReviewOne of my favorite memories from many years ago was the day the annual issue of Car & Driver came that covered the infamous Cannonball race. Car & Driver was always my favorite magazine, it started me going in this hobby. I also soon became a subscriber of AutoWeek (in the original "newspaper" format). Motor Trend was pretty much the same mixed bag back then as it is now, and Road & Track was something I hadn't yet fully learned to appreciate.
I wasn't even driving when the Cannonball races started... but they were definitely a bad influence on me later. When I did finally get my license, I took up TSD rallying.. and once I learned to drive them to proper speed and not to a replay of the Cannonball, I did fairly well.
All true automotive enthusiasts know a little something about this legendary race. When friends gather to talk about the greatest things in the car hobby, this is inevitably one of the topics.
If you've never heard of the Cannonball, you've got some reading to do. The Cannonball was a flat-out wide-open road race on public roads - from New York City to Los Angeles. There were no rules, except that you couldn't board a plane! You, and whomever else could fit into the vehicle, had to drive coast-to-coast with only gas and (perhaps, as there are methods to bypass the need for) pit stops! Top competitors completed the drive in 30+ hours in specially prepared cars - cars that had a high top end or where specially prepared in some other way (enormous gas tanks, painted to resemble cop cars, even an ambulance). This was serious stuff, and it was totally illegal.
Brock tells us that the race was originally conceived to make a point against raising government levels of interference, specifically on the highways. But, when the race was first run, as Brock points out in the book, traffic radar was experimental, the insurance companies hadn't yet figured out how to screw you over for infractions outside of your home state, and the highways themselves were fundamentally more isolated and wide open than they are today. Those were the days!
Sadly, as Brock reminds us, there is no possible way you could do something like this today, indeed even the last one was run in 1979 it was entirely clear that an era was over forever. And that's the way I look back at a lot of stuff from the 50s, 60s, and early 70s. Much of it predated me, nearly all of it predated my involvement in this hobby (other than waiting for that great day every month when Car & Driver would arrive in the mail - as I still do). That was a special and unique time, there will never be anything like that again. There won't ever again be an idea as original as a Shelby Cobra, as the original Mustang, or as the Cannonball.
The book itself is an absolute requirement for the library of all automotive enthusiasts. It's a bit rambling at times, but it's also filled with reprints from the best of the Car & Driver articles of that time, along with commentary and stories by Brock that have never been told before. Just as good are the stories of some of the most famous drivers of these events - such as Dan Gurney. Dan tells his story in his own words - and he is as much a classic of that era (one never to be duplicated) as is the race itself. Dan and Brock were co-drivers of a Ferrari Daytona, arguably the most famous of all the cars that competed.
One of the later drivers was Hal Needham, and that was the beginning of the end. If traffic laws and enormously increased police presence didn't kill this era, then Hal Needham's Cannonball Run movies certainly did. This was the end of the road for these events, satirizing them and making them out to be something that was little more than a clown event. To his credit, Hal did co-drive with Brock - in the infamous ambulance with Brock's wife Pam playing the "victim".
If ever there was a reasonably honest depiction of the Cannonball races in film, it was "The Gumball Rally". It's one of my favorite movies. Unfortunately, Brock was on a (thankfully temporary) downhill slide back then and his response to that film was to look into suing it's makers. In the end, he has refused to see it - ever.
The 15 minutes of fame of Brock's movies are long over, but the race itself will always be here. And, this excellent book is the insider story of it.
Cannonball: World's Greatest Outlaw Road Race OverviewThis first book of its kind tells the behind-the-scenes story of the incredibly illegal Cannonball rally. In the early 1970s, Brock Yates, senior editor of Car and Driver Magazine, created the now infamous Cannonball Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash; a flat out, no-holds-barred race from New York City to Redondo Beach, California. Setting out to prove that well trained drivers could safely navigate the American highways at speeds in excess of the posted limits, Mr. Yates created a spectacle reminiscent of the glory days of the barnstorming pilots. Filled with fascinating unpublished stories, nostalgic and modern-day photographs, inside information and hilarious stories from this outrageous and incredibly immoral rally. Brock is one of the best-known, most respected automotive journalists in the world today.

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