Coast to Coast: The History of Transcontinental Travel, Part 4: The New Record Setters

Throughout the history of American transportation, cross-country migration had been based on three things, imperialism — to conquer new lands and expand the country’s boundaries; on necessity — to farm land and achieve prosperity; and on recreation and education — to see the sights and explore new vistas. Late in the 20th century, a new aspect of cross-country travel emerged: racing, not just getting there, but going faster and getting there quicker.

The Cannonball Run

Dan Gurney and Brock Yates

Known officially as the Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash, the unofficial race was run five times in the 1970s and was the subject of several movies in the following decade. Car and Driver editor Steve Smith and magazine writer and racer Brock Yates devised the event as a celebration of Erwin George “Cannon Ball’ Baker’s previous record setting trips, as well as a protest against the National Maximum Speed Law being enacted in 1974 (which Yates and Smith argued was slower than the average speed of Baker’s 1933 New York City to Los Angeles trek). Yates and Smith were also inspired by various “road movies” of the late 1960s and early 1970s, specifically Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop and Richard C. Sarafian’s Vanishing Point (both released in 1971).

Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash vehicle: a 1971 Dodge Custom Sportsman, called “Moon Trash II”

The object of the race was simple: Leave the Red Ball Garage in New York City and be the first person to reach the Portofino Inn in Redondo Beach in the shortest time possible. There were no other rules.

The first race began on May 3, 1971, using a 1971 Dodge Custom Sportsman van called the “Moon Trash II.” The race was run four more times over the next few years. In the 1975 running, Jack May and Rick Cline drove a Ferrari Dino in a record time of 35 hours and 53 minutes, averaging 83 mph. The second race was won by American racing legend Dan Gurney (winner of the 1967 24 Hours of Le Mans) in a Ferrari Daytona. Dan later remarked, tongue in cheek: “At no time did we exceed 175 mph.”

After five runs, the official record for the Cannonball was 32 hours and 51 minutes (about 87 mph), set in the final run by Dave Heinz and Dave Yarborough in a Jaguar XJS in April 1979. Over 250 racers participated in the Cannonball Run races in anything from a Travco Motorhome (44:42) and a Honda 600 (DNF) to a Ferrari 308 (35:58) and a Mercedes Benz 450 SEL (32:59).

The race entered mainstream consciousness after a series of movies depicting the Cannonball Run debuted, all featuring illegal coast-to-coast races. Cannonball was directed by Paul Bartel and released in 1976, the same year as Charles Bail’s Gumball Rally, a more accurate depiction of the event. In 1981, Burt Reynolds joined an all-star cast in the movie Cannonball Run, based on the exploits of the original race. Cannonball Run was followed up in 1984 with a less-than-successful sequel. Both movies were written by Yates and directed by fellow car enthusiast and career stuntman Hal Needham. The movie uses the actual ambulance they both drove in the 1979 Cannonball Run (complete with a “doctor”). Speed Zone, considered the final installment of the Cannonball Run series of movies was released in 1989, and has a completely different cast (with the sole exception of Jamie Farr).

At Tire Rack One Lap of America, May 2014, via Tire Rack

After Car and Driver succumbed to the risks of sponsoring an illegal event, the editors chose to abandon any further attempts and started a successor race, the “Tire Rack One Lap of America.” Instead of a coast-to-coast straight shot, racers must compete various time trials on public roads and/or racetracks around the country. Started in 1984, the length of a typical race can be up to 10,000 miles. The 2015 event features 7 days of competition over 3245 miles and begins in South Bend, Indiana on Saturday, May 2^nd.

Further Attempts

With the Cannonball Run as its inspiration, one of its former racers, Rick Doherty, organized the U.S. Express with similar aims. The only difference is that the U.S. Express terminated at the beach in Santa Monica, making it slightly longer than the Cannonball Run. The results of the 1983 race broke the previous record, clocking in 32 hours, 7 minutes by David Diem and Doug Turner at the wheel of a Mazda RX-7.

Alexander Roy

Though the U.S. Express record was never official nor was it documented or confirmed, it was still regarded as the record. Alexander Roy is an American rally driver and winner of the very Cannonball-esque Gumball 3000 around-the-world rally from England. A not-too-serious event, Roy regularly attends the rally in various police livery (in 2003 he was dressed as a Canadian Mounted Police driving a 2000 BMW M5). Roy meticulously prepares for rallies with the goal of avoiding police stops by using maps, GPS navigation, and spreadsheets. During the 2004 rally, he impersonated a police officer complete with mounted lights that he used to perform traffic stops against his competitors during the rally.

After hearing about the U.S. Express record from 1983, Roy set out to break its record in 2006. A practice run in December 2005 yielded a finishing time of 34 hours and 46 minutes, and the addition of a spotter plane. The following April ended in a fuel pump failure. The successful run took place over Columbus Day weekend in 2006 with co-driver David Maher (another Gumball rally driver). He traveled 2,794 miles in 31 hours and four minutes with an average speed of 90.1 miles. From New York to Santa Monica, he only encountered four traffic lights and four toll booths.

Dave Black, Ed Bolian, and Dan Huang

A three-man team led by Ed Bolian claims to have driven the 2,813.7 mile route from the Red Ball Garage in New York to the Portofino Inn in Redondo Beach on October 19-20, 2013, in 28 hours and 50 minutes, averaging 98 miles per hour, including the 15 minutes it took to get out of Manhattan. Driving a 2004 Mercedes-Benz CL55 AMG, and stopping only three times for fuel because the car was equipped with two specially installed 22-gallon auxiliary fuel tanks in addition to its standard 23-gallon tank, Bolian offered GPS logs as proof of his accomplishment (read more about it here: Doug DeMuro, “Meet The Guy Who Drove Across The U.S. In A Record 28 Hours 50 Minutes,” Jalopnik, 30 October 2013, Web.)

It is interesting to note that Brock Yates, the original founder of the Cannonball Run doesn’t acknowledge any further attempts, claiming, “Someone was going to get killed.”

Up next: Coast to Coast. The History of Transcontinental Travel, Part 5: The Future of Car Travel

Previous: Coast to Coast. The History of Transcontinental Travel, Part 3: Better Roads, Please

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Coast to Coast: The History of Transcontinental Travel, Part 3: Better Roads, Please

By Ryan Lee Price

Turn of the century cross-country travel by automobile meant traversing poor roads. The trip took weeks, inspiring the US Army to try a journey of its own.

Soon after the turn of the century, some automobile companies were using their products to help promote sales in the shipping industry. In 1908, Packard sent one of its trucks from New York to San Francisco with a three-ton load. The trip took 48 days and helped inspire the US government to try a journey of its own.

The Lincoln Highway
One answer to the need for better roads was a continuous highway from coast to coast. The Lincoln Highway was perhaps the first main road to connect the two coasts, stretching from New York to San Francisco, and its direct impact southwest United States was limited. Most travelers didn’t turn left. In many sections the route made use of old roads, including a 17th-century road in New Jersey laid out by Dutch colonists; the Chambersburg turnpike used by Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia to reach Gettysburg; portions of the Mormon Trail; routes used by the Pony Express; and the Donner Pass crossing of the Sierras.

The Lincoln Highway was the first transcontinental highway. It was named for the nation’s most honored president, Abraham Lincoln.

According to the 1919 edition of the Encyclopedia Americana, “The route is marked with a distinctive red, white and blue marker, bearing a blue ‘L’ on the central white field. For every mile of improvement secured on the Lincoln Highway, 10 miles have followed as a direct result upon other routes connecting important centers north and south with the main line. Along its entire length the highest type of highway construction is represented in this modern American Appian Way.”

In 1916, Woodrow Wilson announced as part of his election platform: “The happiness, comfort and prosperity of rural life, and the development of the city, are alike conserved by the construction of public highways.” He signed the Federal Aid Road Act, the first federal highway funding law, providing $75 million to build and improve roads.

The US Army Joins the Convoy
When moving people and materiel by railroad alone during World War I proved inadequate, the US Army experimented with truck convoys to supplement the railroad. The two-month ordeal of the US Army Transcontinental Motor Convoy in 1919 convinced the Army of the need for better roads.

US Army Transcontinental Motor Convoy of 1919

Despite this “Appian Way,” the US Army was determined to discover the true conditions of roads to the Pacific and set out on July 7 from Washington DC with 81 vehicles and trailers, including: 34 heavy cargo trucks, 4 light delivery trucks, two mobile machine shops, one blacksmith shop, one wrecking truck, an artillery wheeled tractor that towed nine trucks at once and was equipped with a power winch. There were two spare parts stores, two water tanks, one gasoline tank, one searchlight with an electrical power plant truck, four kitchen trailers, eight touring cars, one reconnaissance car, two staff observation cars, five sidecar motorcycles, and four solo motorcycles. As well as five GMC ambulances with two ambulance trailers, a four-ton pontoon trailer (left in Omaha) and a Renault Whippet FT-17 tank lashed to a flatbed trailer. Dealers en route supplied gasoline and tires to the convoy and the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company provided two trucks that carried spare standard tires.

Most all of the 3,250 miles of roadways were unpaved and undeveloped, creating untold problems, both mechanical and logistical. Most of the men were not trained to use the equipment and literally only one man of the 24 officers (including a young Dwight D. Eisenhower), 15 staff members from the War Department and 258 enlisted men — Henry Ostermann — knew the way across what was then still a patchwork of roads that ranged from concrete to mud (he had driven across the country 19 times).

Passing through 350 towns and communities and being witnessed by nearly three million people, the convoy completed the trip in 63 days, arriving in Oakland, California on September 7, proving that the infrastructure of the country was woefully inadequate to transport much of anything, especially during a time of war.

In his novel Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck called Route 66, “The “Mother Road,” because it was used during the Dust Bowl and Great Depression in the 1930s by hundreds of thousands of people to flee great hardship.

Get Your Kicks on Route 66
Route 66 was a highway spawned by the demands of a rapidly changing America. Contrasted with the Lincoln, the Dixie, and other highways of its day, Route 66 did not follow the traditionally linear course as did the other highways. Its unusual diagonal course linked hundreds of rural communities in Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas to Chicago; thus enabling farmers to transport grain and produce for redistribution. The diagonal configuration of Route 66 was particularly significant to the trucking industry, which by 1930 had come to rival the railroad for preeminence in the American shipping industry. The “Mother Road,” christened so by John Steinbeck in his novel Grapes of Wrath, between Chicago and the Pacific Coast, traversed essentially flat prairie lands and enjoyed a more temperate climate than northern highways, which made it especially appealing to truckers.

From Chicago, Route 66 began as nothing more than a series of intertwining trails headed west, mostly a cobbling of farm-to-market roads, driveways, paths, old wagon trails, small rudely improved thoroughfares and downtown streets … as long as it pointed westward and got you out of town and toward the next, it was part of what would be called Route 66. More importantly, it ferried people to California, especially during the Great Depression when thousands of tenant farmers searched for a new life and better opportunities.

Until roughly 1926 (though official U.S. Route 66 signs didn’t appear until the following year), travelers would have to brave unmarked roads and meandering byways with trepidation that the next town would be just over the horizon. The road was rough and unforgiving, but the promise of California was a tempting motive, and as more cars became a prevalent part of American culture, more people took to the road.

Interstate Highway System
In an effort not only to connect the country’s population, but also to connect the country’s military installations and to ease the travel of the military, the Interstate Highway System was planned and implemented in earnest after the signing of the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1921.

In 1922, the Bureau of Public Roads commissioned General John “Black Jack” Pershing to provide a proposal for a national highway system (based on importance in the event of war). His proposal, referred to as “The Pershing Map,” was 32-feet long and suggested the building of 78,000 miles of road, most of which were completed and formed a substantial portion of the Interstate Highway System.

Throughout the 1920s, road construction boomed with the increased enthusiasm behind traveling and visiting the nation’s newest National Parks. From a 1922 report for the Department of Interior from the National Parks Service, it is clear that the automobile had really mobilized a nation [punctuation is original]: “Undoubtedly the principal factor in the travel movement in this country to-day is the enlarged use of the automobile. It is true the automobile affords a wide freedom in movement of parties limited only by the capacity of the cars, and permits stops at or excursions from any points en route to a particular destination that appeal to the members of the party. It meets the opportunities for out-of-door recreation that we Americans as a sightseeing nation seem to crave, and has come to be considered by many to be the ideal means of vacation travel.”

Having spent two months with the 1919 Army Convoy and seeing the mobilization of Germany with the Reichsautobahn system during World War II, Dwight D. Eisenhower was a strong proponent of the highway system. In 1955 the General Location of National System of Interstate Highways mapped out what became the Interstate System, and Charles Erwin Wilson, who was head of General Motors when President Eisenhower selected him as Secretary of Defense in January 1953, planned out the implementation of the highway system. This was in the midst of the Cold War, and Eisenhower debated for the highways for the purpose of national defense. In the event of an invasion, the US Army would need good highways to be able to transport troops across the country efficiently.

Missouri road was the first project of the 1956 Federal Aid Highway Act.

The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 (known as the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956), authorized $25 billion dollars to be spent over 12 years of construction (with the states paying 10 percent of the cost through taxes on fuel, cars and tires). However, it ended up costing $114 billion and took 35 years. The last portion of the original plans — a section of the I-70 through Glenwood Canyon in Colorado — was completed on October 14, 1992.

The nation was connected.

Up next: Coast to Coast. The History of Transcontinental Travel, Part 4: The New Record Setters

Previous: Coast to Coast. The History of Transcontinental Travel, Part 2: Wheels and Wings

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