Fred Ashmore was just outside Needles, California, in the parched low desert where the jagged southern point of Nevada meets the Arizona-California border, when he felt it wash over him. A kind of confusion melting into panic. He was exhausted, which he knew was making everything worse. It was about 1 a.m., and he'd been at the wheel for almost 24 hours now, rocketing west at speeds well over 100 miles per hour. For lucky stretches, when the road opened up and Ashmore punched the throttle, he could get his silver Ford Mustang GT up to 159 mph—the car's top speed, he'd discovered. Now, ahead of him in the inky-black night, he could see the flash of brake lights, a river of travelers funneling into a slow-moving line.
Before long, Ashmore was inching along the desert highway, feeling crucial minutes tick by and craning to see what was ahead. That's when he noticed trunks popping open and a new fear took hold. Officials from the California Department of Food and Agriculture were searching vehicles entering the state. He watched a car in front of him stop and then get looked over from top to bottom. If they do that to my car, Ashmore thought, I'm probably not getting it back.
On the outside, his Mustang looked pretty much like any other car on the road. Inside was another story. Splayed across Ashmore's dashboard was an array of devices, including a CB radio, a mounted tablet operating Waze and Google Maps, and an iPhone running a timer. Stuck to the inside of the windshield was a radar detector; on the front grille and back bumper were the sensors for a laser jammer. Even more conspicuously, strapped beside and behind Ashmore, where the front and rear passenger seats should have been, huge fuel tanks sloshed with gasoline. A series of hoses connected them—along with another enormous tank, this one in the trunk—to the car's main fuel tank. An officer inspecting Ashmore's rig could have been forgiven for concluding that he was driving a giant gasoline bomb.
In fact, it was a vehicle customized for a single purpose: to complete the “Cannonball Run,” one of the great underground feats in American car culture—and to do it faster than anyone in history. Unofficial, unsanctioned, and spectacularly illegal, the Cannonball had been a staple of automotive lore for almost a half century before Ashmore's attempt late last spring. The rules are simple: Drivers start in Manhattan, at the Red Ball Garage on East 31st Street, and finish at the Portofino, a hotel in Redondo Beach, California. What happens in between is up to them. Not surprisingly, the race requires an almost astonishing—and endlessly creative—disregard for traffic laws.
Over the decades, teams had been chipping away at the time needed to cover the 2,800 miles—cutting the record by nearly 10 hours since 1971, until it rested at 27 hours and 25 minutes. But among the clique of Cannonball devotees who kept tabs on the sport, a refrain of conventional wisdom had set in: The record could hardly fall much lower. There were simply too many cars on the road, and every innovation in engineering and technology—better fuel economy, more horsepower, the advent of digital navigation—seemed only to increase the problem. The Cannonball was bumping up against the limits of what was humanly possible.
But earlier this year, that calculus changed. The arrival of the coronavirus and the lockdown that followed emptied America's roads like nothing had before. Traffic—the most confounding and unpredictable variable in any Cannonball run—was suddenly a virtual nonissue. The roads were clear, and as Americans hunkered down last spring, a contingent of Cannonball obsessives spotted a moment of rare opportunity. They saw what Fred Ashmore saw: The record was there for the taking.
Now, as he idled in the darkness at the border checkpoint—with fewer than 300 miles to go—Ashmore could feel his shot at the record slipping away. Every second counted. When he set out, he knew that achieving the record would require a total average speed of nearly 110 mph—meaning that for every minute spent parked along the way, he would have to drive one minute at the impossible speed of 220 mph just to stay on target.
He'd been awake for over a day—had barely even moved in his seat since exiting Oklahoma—and was feeling the claustrophobic dread of sleep deprivation. As he waited his turn in the slow-moving line, he imagined what was coming next: He was headed to jail, no doubt about it. But Ashmore had even prepared for that: He'd packed cash for bail.
The officer tapped on the driver's side window and then noted the Texas plates on the Mustang. He asked what Ashmore's business was in California. “I just took a job here,” he replied. “I'm moving.” Without so much as a second glance inside the vehicle, the officer adopted a perfunctory tone and rattled through a list of fruits and vegetables, asking if Ashmore was bringing any of them across the border. That's when Ashmore realized his worrying had been for naught. He was going to avoid a night in jail. In fact, he figured the speed record might still be possible. His half-hour delay had been costly, but as Ashmore was waved along, his fear gave way to an adrenalized sense of urgency. He hammered the throttle and the speedometer quickly topped out. The desert opened flat in front of him; he was desperate to make up for lost time.
The romance of the American road trip is rooted in a simple, time-honored notion: Only by driving—ideally slow, meandering driving—can we fully appreciate the vastness of this country. Fly overhead and you'll reach your destination more quickly, but you'll also miss everything in between. The Cannonball run flips that idea on its head, inviting us to see that even when experienced on four wheels, the country can be made to seem quite small, conquerable even—something you can wrap your arms around.
The Cannonball is the ultimate road trip, even as it jettisons the usual conventions of the road trip: There are no stops for photos, no detours to sample the World's Greatest Pancakes, no putting the top down to shout along to the radio as the wind whips by. These trips are thrillingly tactical, planned down to the minute—built, for instance, around traffic light cycles in Manhattan and peak usage times at rural gas stations. A competitor spends hours prepping with satellite maps and complex spreadsheets, constructing timetables that break the country into five-mile increments. All that work, designed to avoid spontaneity.
And yet it was a kind of spontaneity that birthed the race back in 1971, when a 37-year-old automotive journalist named Brock Yates set out from New York City, bound for Los Angeles. At the time that he conceived of the trip, the country was in the grips of a panic over automotive safety, sparked in part by the consumer advocate Ralph Nader and his famous book, Unsafe at Any Speed. The alarm helped catalyze the creation of the Department of Transportation and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and prompted the passage of seat belt laws in dozens of states. A push for a national speed limit of 55 mph—justified on the grounds of both safety and fuel conservation—was gaining traction as well.
Yates, a lifelong champion of civil disobedience and libertarian ideas, had a different vision of America's roads. Yates wanted to show that it was possible for Americans to drive safely at high speeds on the interstate, just as Germans did on the Autobahn. “Yes, make high-speed travel by car a reality!” Yates wrote. “Truth and justice affirmed by an overtly illegal act.”
Forty hours and 51 minutes after Yates—along with two friends and his 14-year-old son—set off, he reached Los Angeles. The nonstop drive was a test run for an audacious plan that Yates had hatched: a multicar race across America that would prove, once and for all, that capable drivers in capable cars could cross the country faster and more safely than anyone imagined. Or, as Yates put it: “a balls-out, shoot-the-moon, fuck-the-establishment rumble from New York to Los Angeles.” The starting point of the race would be the Red Ball Garage, on East 31st Street in Manhattan, where Yates's employer, Car and Driver magazine, kept a test fleet of cars. The destination, the Portofino Inn, in Redondo Beach, California, was owned by a friend of Yates's. He called the race the Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash.
The name was an homage to Erwin “Cannon Ball” Baker, the father of American endurance racing and the holder, for almost 40 years, of the transcontinental record, with a time of 53 hours and 30 minutes. The inaugural Cannonball run was held six months after Yates's initial cross-country journey and featured eight teams and 23 participants. Among the entrants were a flight attendant, two restaurateurs, and a Union Oil public relations professional in a Travco Motor Home. Driving a Ferrari Daytona, Yates and his teammate, a professional racer named Dan Gurney, smashed Baker's record with a time of 35 hours and 54 minutes. When Yates's tongue-in-cheek chronicle of the race appeared in Car and Driver, the event became a sensation.
But by 1979, the Cannonball was more carnival than competition, with teams masquerading as EMTs, off-duty cops, and even a crew of satellite tracking-and-recovery specialists. Though Yates seemed to relish the mayhem as much as anyone—he drove the fake ambulance, after all—he also got tired of it, and feared what it might produce. “I stopped the race, because I knew sooner or later that somebody was going to get killed,” he said years later. His disillusionment only increased when, in 1981, Burt Reynolds immortalized the race on film as a slapstick comedy. Critics savaged The Cannonball Run. “The whole movie thing has never been a source of great pride for me,” Yates later wrote in Car and Driver.
After Yates pulled the plug, the event began to peter out and the record setting went largely dormant. In 1983, a new record of 32 hours and seven minutes was set in a successor event called the U.S. Express, but after that, there were no verified attempts for nearly a quarter century. Of course, during that same period, the movie—much to Yates's consternation—became a cult hit, circulating among new generations of car enthusiasts like a relic of a lost time and indoctrinating scores of would-be Cannonballers into the gospel of speed. All they needed was for someone to make the first move.
Among those infatuated by the Cannonball was Ed Bolian, a car-crazed teenager in suburban Atlanta. In 2004 he reached out to Yates, who was cordial but insistent: With the number of cars now on the road, not to mention the number of cops, it was impossible to beat the old records or to push beyond the 30-hour wall.
But the Cannonball wasn't dead yet. In May 2006 the event got a jolt of energy when Alex Roy, a rally driver, and Dave Maher, a Wall Street banker, drove a souped-up 2000 BMW M5 from the Red Ball Garage to the Santa Monica Pier in 31 hours and four minutes. Roy and Maher's run brought the race into the modern era—but it did very little to make the record seem attainable for an average car guy like Bolian. Roy's pursuit of the record had cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and was even aided by a rented spotter plane that flew ahead of him to look out for cops. In subsequent interviews, Roy described the run in daunting terms—you will fail, you will get arrested, you will die—perhaps in the hope of scaring off any would-be followers who might try for his new record.
Bolian was undeterred. He spent years breaking the Cannonball down into a series of subproblems that he could analyze and solve: traffic, timing, route, fuel consumption, and more. The pursuit of that singular goal carried him through his 20s, even as he struggled to find co-drivers and people to support him—or just to assure him that he wasn't crazy. The rush of attention brought by Roy's run had evaporated just as quickly as it arrived. As far as Bolian could tell, there was no one else out there who was even remotely interested in the Cannonball anymore.
Eventually, Bolian was ready to take his shot. In 2013, after a decade of research and $45,000 in investment—“every penny I had”—he made a run in a modified 2004 Mercedes-Benz CL55 AMG. Along with his co-driver, Dave Black, and their navigator and lookout, Dan Huang, Bolian broke the record and the 30-hour mark, with a time of 28 hours and 50 minutes.
Bolian had changed the game. “It was the attitude more than anything,” another Cannonballer told me. “ ‘We're going to go out and run this fast, and we might get arrested, but we're going to take that chance.’ No one had really done that before.” If they'd been caught, Bolian and his team wouldn't just have received lots of expensive tickets. In many states there's a distinction between simple speeding infractions and the more egregious crimes of racing and recklessness, which carry the possibility of serious jail time. If all the counties that Bolian had sped through had decided to prosecute him—94 in total—he could have gone to jail for the rest of his life. “Everyone else had been going ticket speeds,” the Cannonballer said. “Ed was going ‘Arrest me now’ speeds.”
As soon as word got out about Bolian's achievement, he was inundated with messages. He started a private Facebook group that grew to more than 50 members, all of them swapping notes, comparing cars, and prepping for runs of their own. “Anything I could do to find other crazy people like me and get them in the same room, I did,” Bolian told me. He's a lanky, affable, and unceasingly polite 35-year-old with a languorous Southern accent and a soothing baritone voice. In his free time, he teaches Sunday school. He also just happens to be the unofficial-but-official godfather, gatekeeper, and preserver of modern Cannonballing.
Bolian organized events, hosted dinners at his own home, and founded an app called VINwiki with a corresponding YouTube channel that has become the most authoritative repository of modern Cannonball lore. When drivers are thinking of doing a Cannonball, they ask Bolian for advice; when they need an impartial timekeeper to track their progress across the country and verify their attempt, they send their data and evidence to Bolian.
He knew that by fostering this small, strange community—“a fraternity of lunatics,” as Bolian called them—he was seeding the ground for his own eventual dethroning. For a kid who spent years thinking he was alone in his fervor for the Cannonball, the risk seemed worth it. “Not only was I a record holder,” he said, “but I cared much, much more about the history of it than anyone who had come before me.”
And people did try to take him down: Between 2013 and late 2019, there were dozens of well-planned, all-out attempts to claim the record. They all failed until November 2019, when drivers Doug Tabbutt and Arne Toman, with spotter Berkeley Chadwick, recorded a time of 27 hours and 25 minutes in a tricked-out 2015 Mercedes-Benz E63 AMG. The team's average speed was 103 mph; their top speed was 193.
Now that record, everyone figured, was truly unbeatable—until COVID-19 cleared the roads and set off a mad scramble to be the fastest of all time.
Growing up in Downeast Maine in the early 1980s, Fred Ashmore discovered the Cannonball the same way many others did: He watched the movie when it came out on home video. For a long time he didn't even know the story was real. The family had only three TV channels, and in those days, Ashmore said, “if it wasn't in your local newspaper, it didn't exist.” Only years later, as a teen flipping through old copies of Road & Track magazine in the high school library, did he discover that people actually used to run the Cannonball. He was too late, he figured: The Cannonball was dead.
Throughout high school and college, Ashmore worked as a mechanic and spent his spare time racing anything he could find, like stock cars and drag racers. Nothing seemed to satisfy his automotive itch—not until he began pondering the notion of a cross-country run. Part of the attraction was cultural and nostalgic. “It's Americana, like driving Route 66,” Ashmore told me. But the race also offered the ultimate test of testosterone-fueled, speed-drenched lunacy—a chance to beat almost 50 years' worth of other drivers.
In 2014, after posting an ad on Facebook for a muscle car he'd fixed up, Ashmore got to chatting with a New Zealander named Ben “Charlie Safari” Wilson and learned about an upcoming cross-country race requiring entrants to use only cars built before 1980 and purchased for less than $3,000. Ashmore was tired of racing around the same track against the same people night after night, and a coast-to-coast run seemed just crazy enough to try. He entered, had fun, and entered again in 2018 and 2019, setting speed records for the race on both runs. He eschewed most of the sophisticated technology that other cross-country racers embraced, like aircraft-collision-avoidance systems (to check for police planes overhead), thermal scopes, and military-style gyro-stabilized binoculars. He also avoided the more conventional performance enhancers that other competitors relied on to stay alert. “I've never drank coffee in my life,” he said. He didn't listen to music. Instead he kept himself awake by doing math in his head: calculating his mileage per gallon, the distance to his next city, and his expected arrival time. He never had an accident or even a fender bender. Not until last year, when he was blindsided by a driver who, he says, ran a stop sign. He was unfazed. “Shit happens,” he told me. “I've been very lucky. My number probably should've been called before that.” But his car—a 1979 Mustang Cobra that he, his brother, and his dad had rebuilt by hand—was wrecked.
Earlier this year, as the country went into lockdown, there wasn't much for Ashmore to do other than think about Cannonball. “COVID was weird,” he said. “Once the sun went down, there was nowhere to go.” He was biding his time in Oklahoma, where he'd gone to help a friend clean up a recently acquired car collection, and spending his nights analyzing the new traffic patterns, watching traffic cams in New York City and Los Angeles, and toying with possible routes on Google Maps.
Ashmore knew that the sudden disappearance of most car traffic represented an obvious and enticing advantage. But in the earliest days of the pandemic, it wasn't clear that driving across the country was even possible—could you get into New York City or California? Maybe gas stations would be closed, or the Army would get called in to control traffic or close roads near COVID hot spots. Other Cannonballers were hunkered down across the country, wondering the same thing. What if I'm in the middle of Nebraska and they start shutting down state borders? The lockdown might be the perfect time to make a run—or maybe the worst.
Ashmore knew he wasn't alone in wondering if the global catastrophe was creating an unlikely opportunity. What he would soon discover, though, was that the lockdown was spawning a frenzy.
One of the drivers who toyed with making a run was Carl “Yumi” Dietz, who drove up to New York from South Carolina on April 3 and decided to give it a shot. Almost instantly he discovered that conditions were ideal. Manhattan had long been regarded as “the destroyer of Cannonball dreams,” as one race veteran put it: On a normal run in typical traffic, it can take more than an hour to get out of the city; under 20 minutes is considered lucky. Dietz set off from the Red Ball at 4 p.m., when New York is usually jammed with traffic, but the streets were deserted, and he blasted off the island in five minutes. “I may or may not have hit triple-digit speed in the Lincoln Tunnel,” he said. “Who can say that?”
It was an idyllic run, start to finish: the stuff of every Cannonballer's dreams. The roads felt empty, and there were almost no cops in sight. “Even though I was running 100 mph the whole way, it was so relaxing,” Dietz said. “Usually you're beating your head against the steering wheel, going, ‘Get the heck out of the way!’ But it wasn't like that this time.” He spent the night with his cruise control set between 100 and 119 mph, relishing every moment of the drive. “Every time you hit a turn at 110 mph in the Rocky Mountains or the hills of Pennsylvania, the birds are chirping, it's like there are unicorns on the road. It's just blissful,” Dietz said. “Literally blissful.”
Twenty-seven hours and 54 minutes after Dietz left the Red Ball, he pulled into the Portofino as the new solo record holder. He felt unconquerable. “This,” a friend told him, “is a record that will never be broken.”
Plenty were trying, though. In fact, just before Dietz crossed the finish line, another car had reached the Portofino, setting a record of its own for the fastest run in a diesel-engine vehicle. As Dietz and the crew from the diesel car were hanging out, toasting to their success, one of the guys got a call. It was Ed Bolian, monitoring progress from afar. “Another team is about to pull in,” he said.
Before long, a white 2019 Audi A8 zoomed into the parking lot, and three young men hopped out. In the small, tight-knit community of Cannonball devotees, where everyone knows everyone, the guys in the A8 were complete unknowns—and they'd just smashed Tabbutt and Toman's overall record.
A day earlier, before leaving from the Red Ball, the trio had dubbed their team Captain Chaos, in honor of a character from the 1981 movie. Now, 26 hours and 38 minutes after unwittingly setting out on Dietz's tail, the three were cracking open beers to celebrate with Dietz and the diesel guys. Almost immediately, a police car rolled up to the parking lot entrance. A cop came on the loudspeaker: “You are not social distancing,” he said. “Leave.”
News of the Captain Chaos run blew up on the internet, especially when it was reported that the team made the run in a car belonging to one of their fathers, with no planning and little more than a couple of marine fuel tanks in the trunk and a tablet running Waze. Before the details of the run were confirmed, Car and Driver published a piece calling them “three (or possibly four) of this country's biggest assholes.” For Chris (who asked that his last name not be used), one of the team members, this felt like a bit much—there are, after all, a lot of assholes in this country.
Yes, the run had been hastily conceived but not totally unplanned, he said—the crew had spent about 10 days in a mad rush to prep the car, plot their route, and test out strategies. “I would love to tell you we were going white-knuckle the whole time,” he said. “But we were trying to be safe, trying to be conservative. There's no reason to risk it—we weren't passing on the shoulder, and we were even limiting our passing on the right-hand side.” Across almost a half century of attempts, the Cannonball has a near-miraculous safety history, with only one recorded accident: In 1972 a team veered off the road after the driver fell asleep at the wheel. She suffered a broken arm, but no other vehicles were involved. Chris and his teammates, James and Kale, didn't want to be the ones to tarnish that legacy. (“We did hit a raccoon while doing 130 mph on the Pennsylvania Turnpike,” Chris said. “I'll admit that.”)
Then it was a free-for-all: Within a few months, the previous year's record had been bested five different times. Bolian's old 2013 mark, which had stood for six years, was beaten in seven instances. There seemed to be a new record almost every week.
Watching all this from his camper parked in Oklahoma, Ashmore was inspired by what felt like a once-in-a-lifetime chance to make a run with almost no other cars on the road. “Doing the most dangerous thing at the safest time,” he said. He had tracked the Captain Chaos run on Glympse, a real-time location-sharing app popular among Cannonballers. He took note of what they did well and where they had trouble; he began concocting a plan to put into action every minor advantage that a solo driver would have over a team. The most obvious was fuel. “If I could take those two other people out and replace them with fuel,” Ashmore said, “I could do it.” More gas meant fewer stops and thus fewer opportunities for something to go wrong—a credit card getting declined, a broken gas pump, a line to use the restroom. “I won't say what I did was ingenious,” Ashmore said. “But what I did was capitalize on the places where everyone else had left an opening.” There was just one problem: He didn't have a car capable of making a serious run. After the accident, his Cobra was still just a twisted scrap of metal.
He decided to use a rental car. “I thought it was laughable,” Ashmore said, but with a little engineering, there was no reason it couldn't work. He went to the Tulsa airport and spotted the silver Mustang GT in the parking lot. “What about that one?” he asked. He knew the Mustang had a top speed of more than 150 mph and figured its suspension would be good enough to handle a few extra gas tanks. He rented it for two and a half weeks, at a price of $700. He declined the rental agency's supplemental insurance.
Ashmore took the car to a friend's truck shop and started tearing it apart. He yanked out the front and rear passenger seats and seat belts, the spare tire and jack, trunk trim pieces, and anything else he could to lighten the car and create extra space. In their place he installed three mammoth fuel tanks: a 52-gallon in the trunk, a 27-gallon in the back seat, and a 32-gallon beside him. Combined with the car's built-in 16-gallon tank, that gave him almost 130 gallons to work with.
He did the math. If he maintained a speed consistent with just over 11 miles per gallon, he could cover 1,403 miles between stops. The key would be refueling; he'd make one stop, he decided. And then he took the fuel question a step further. Instead of inviting variables and delays at a gas station, Ashmore would have two friends meet him off the interstate in Oklahoma, where they'd be waiting with a Chevy pickup outfitted with two huge gas tanks and multiple hoses that could pump 20 gallons per minute—twice the government-mandated limit on commercial pumps. The whole thing would take less than eight minutes. “Cannonballing is about being smart,” Ashmore said. “Anybody can go out and hold the pedal down until they get pulled over.”
As a finishing touch, Ashmore installed a light bar across the front of the car and put an antenna on the back, to make the Mustang look like an undercover cop car. He figured it would help with navigating around truckers and make it less likely that another driver would call the police on him.
Then came the route. As with Everest, the Cannonball has a northern and a southern route: the northern cutting through the Rocky Mountains, Utah, and Nevada, the southern through Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Ashmore distrusted the northern route. The weather in the Rockies was too unpredictable, and the thin air in the mountains was hard on a car's fuel system. He would go south.
Finally, there was the question of bathroom stops. Ashmore wouldn't take any. He bought a cache of Pringles, beef jerky, Cheez-Its, and other salty foods and a few bottles of Powerade and lemon water. The emptied Powerade bottles would become his urinals, for use on the road. “It's a project,” he said. “You have to focus the entire time. Nothing else matters.”
He set off without a hitch and flew across the eastern half of the country. The fuel stop went as smoothly as hoped, and by the time he got to Texas, Ashmore knew he had a shot at the record. He estimates that he did a total of five or six hours at the car's absolute top speed of 159 mph.
Of course, then Ashmore hit the California border and his trip nearly fell apart. Barreling through the desert after getting hung up at the checkpoint, Ashmore was exhausted. He sailed up and over one last hill, took a hard left, and swept down into the San Bernardino Valley. Los Angeles was in sight.
Soon, in his rearview mirror, he saw a pair of lights, flashing red and blue, coming up behind him. “If I did get stopped, it was inevitably over,” Ashmore said. He made a split-second decision. Ashmore flipped on his blinker and exited the freeway, then looped under the overpass and took off in the opposite direction on the freeway he'd just exited. He did the same thing at the next exit, “cloverleafing” the cop and shaking him off his tail in the process. Somewhere, the officer had taken a wrong turn. Relieved, Ashmore drove on.
The last five miles felt like an eternity, an endless series of sub-interstates and local roads that seemed to be going nowhere at all. He sneaked gingerly through stop signs and red lights until he reached the final intersection, where he peeped for any waiting police cars and finally zipped into the hotel parking lot. He looked at the iPhone timer mounted on the dash: 25 hours and 55 minutes—the fastest time in history.
There was no one at the Portofino to congratulate him, no brass band, no fawning fans. He didn't have time to celebrate, anyway; he needed to get out of there. Ashmore took time-stamped photos as evidence of his feat, turned off all the equipment, and threw the radar detector and rear jammer sensor in the trunk. He had about 30 miles of gas left, and he wanted to refuel as far away as possible before beginning the drive back home, this time at the speed limit.
It was only then, as he headed east in the early-morning light, that Ashmore had time to consider his accomplishment. His thoughts crystallized around a single, bewildering question: What the hell did you just do?
The reception for a new record holder is often underwhelming. The day after he set the record, Doug Tabbutt flew back home. His friend picked him up at the airport and took him to a bar to celebrate. After a few drinks, the friend got up and called for everyone's attention: “Hey, you've all heard of the Cannonball run? Well, this guy just set a new record!” A few people turned from the football game they were watching to offer half-hearted congratulations. A young man sitting alone at the bar, nursing a drink, shouted toward Tabbutt and his friend. “You know there's a thing called airplanes, right?”
And yet, a few months later, Tabbutt was back in the car with Toman, chasing the record again. “You get to Nevada and say, ‘I'm never doing this again,’ ” Tabbutt said. “And then two days after you finish, you say, ‘I'm doing it again.’ ” Other drivers felt the same way. “Did I have a good time?” asked Sam Lurie, a member of one of the COVID-era teams. “No, not really. Am I glad I did it? Yes, absolutely.”
To many of those who attempt it, the motivations can be almost spiritual. “To me, driving cross-country is about the most American thing you can do,” Dietz told me. “Driving it at speed, I feel, is just the embodiment of the American outlaw spirit, kind of civil disobedience at its finest, albeit its most immature and selfish state. That's a very alluring part of it.”
Dietz got his start in cross-country driving when he was in college in the early 1990s, after a friend of his read Kerouac and they decided to point their car west and go looking for adventure. He estimates he's been cross-country probably 50 times now. “It's my favorite pastime,” he said. “Seeing the landscape change and thinking about the old wagon trains and the Manifest Destiny of ‘Go west, young man’—the good and the bad of it—and the modern stuff of the Cannonball and thinking what the guys in the '70s and '80s went through when the roads still weren't finished.”
Driving the Cannonball also forces you to recognize how miraculous it is to be able to drive from one coast to another in little more than a day, without danger or fear. Not so long ago, the Donner Party was reduced to cannibalism while attempting to reach the Pacific coast. Now that great expanse can be crossed with simplicity. “Time is the only currency,” said Alex Roy, who broke the Cannonball record in 2006. “The first settlers paid a much higher price to get there, in the same way that the first sailors who crossed the Atlantic did.”
For the “fraternity of lunatics” who care about the Cannonball, the race is a last chance to be part of that legacy of exploration and adventure. “What compels these people to get in these cars and drive like madmen and then get out at the end and be like, ‘That was cool’?” asked Travis Bell, a longtime Cannonballer and a friend of Yates's. “There's no parade for Fred Ashmore; he's not getting the key to any cities. But no one else has done it. There aren't a lot of ‘no one else has done its’ left in the world.”
A few months after Ashmore broke the record, I was sitting beside him in the Mustang GT, in the passenger seat that had once been just a giant fuel tank. After returning the car to the Tulsa airport, Ashmore managed to buy it and bring it home to Maine. “So,” he said, turning to me, “what's the fastest you've ever gone?”
We were cruising down a flat, unencumbered stretch of interstate in eastern Maine. A hurricane had passed through the previous night, and it looked like the world had been made anew: a field of fluffy, milky-white clouds in a pastel blue sky, the forest around us radiant and green, the road seemingly scrubbed clean. Ashmore is 45, stout and barrel-chested with a ruddy, sunburned face, close-cropped brown hair, and an eager, boyish smile.
Behind the wheel, he knows he's different from other drivers. “Most people want to go 100 mph, and then they're on to the next thought,” he said. “They lose interest. It's something different to stay locked in for 20 hours.” Ashmore has been driving long stretches without sleep all his life; even other Cannonballers think he's unique, in a good way. “Only Fred can just go out and do that,” said Toman. “It's not advisable for anyone else to try. If you knew Fred, you'd understand: That's not for me; that's a Fred thing.” Doug Tabbutt compared Ashmore to Michael Phelps. “God gave him a body that's made for swimming,” Tabbutt said. “Together with his skill, that makes him unbeatable.” More than anything, Ashmore's gift is mental: He's heard of people buckling under the strain near the end of a Cannonball—they start shouting, convinced they're going to die, and demand to be let out of the car immediately. Ashmore is different. “I've been upside down in cars, on fire, almost bled to death,” he said. “I just don't freak out in cars.” The COVID lockdown was simply his Olympics.
We were in the left-hand lane, driving at a comfortable speed—a little over the 75-mph speed limit—but you could already hear the rumble of the exhaust coming from the back of the car, sounding like a pack of growling pit bulls. Ashmore started pressing down on the accelerator: 110 mph, 120 mph, 130 mph. What had been a pleasant blur of forest outside my window became an indistinguishable mass of green. Ashmore kept pushing: 140 mph, 150 mph, and the car's top speed of 159 mph. The hood started to shake, the mirrors rattled, and the rush of wind outside mixed with the sound of the engine to produce an overpowering roar. “It's getting lovely,” Ashmore said. We passed by cars doing 80 mph that looked like they were parked. Ashmore had spent five or six hours at this speed, during a stretch of more than 30 hours in which he barely slept.
It was intoxicating. Two days earlier, I'd been on a flight to Portland, Maine, wearing an N95 mask, a face shield, and surgical gloves—afraid to breathe because of an invisible virus that had shut down the entire world, eyeing the other passengers as if their exhalations might poison me. The dangers felt bewildering, almost unfathomable. But now the thrill of flying down the road in a Mustang was pure, visceral, liberating, and comprehensible. The perils were obvious; the exhilaration made sense. I looked over at Ashmore and he was smiling. “The road is my office. It's a spot to take time and think about what I want,” he said. “It's my peaceful time. It's just at a high rate of speed.”
A few weeks later, Toman and Tabbutt announced that they had made another run, in the last traffic-free window provided by the lockdown, and reclaimed their overall record. They'd put everything they had into the run: a nationwide network of spotters and pace cars, extensive police countermeasures, and the experience of a combined 10 previous Cannonball runs. Like Ashmore, they'd made a series of adjustments to the car—including adding a Ford logo to their Audi and painting the center caps of the wheels silver—so that it might look like an off-duty police cruiser. They beat Ashmore's solo record time by 16 minutes.
Ashmore was disappointed, but he wasn't following other drivers in predicting the end of the Cannonball as a result of the ridiculous times that COVID had made possible. “It's an Americana thing, just like people always want to go to Mount Rushmore,” he said. “Cannonball is just a thing that people will always do.”
The record, however satisfying, was never really the point. More than anything, Ashmore, Bolian, and the other drivers who'd dedicated years of their lives to Cannonball wanted a chance to etch their names in the legacy of the only race that never ends—the only race in America that could be happening any day, at any time, with almost no one on the planet being any the wiser. It was a chance to partake in something that has helped generations of guys like them find some meaning, even in the worst and strangest of times—a wonderful, suicidally foolish dream they'd held since boyhood. “I hope my son can find a pursuit like this that can help the tough times make sense and that can carry you through them,” Bolian said. “I just hope it's not Cannonballing.”
Alex W. Palmer wrote about a Chinese art-crime conspiracy in the August 2018 issue of GQ.
A version of this story originally appears in the November 2020 issue with the title "The Great Cannonball Boom."