pikesome
10-17-2007, 06:07 AM
Linky - It's a long article. (http://www.wired.com/cars/coolwheels/magazine/15-11/ff_cannonballrun?currentPage=1)
And so the clock starts and the taillights flare, and they're off again, strapped down, fueled up, and bound on an outlaw enterprise with 2,795 miles of interstate and some 31,000 highway cops between them and the all-time speed record for crossing the American continent on four wheels.
The gear is all bought and loaded. Twenty packs of Nat Sherman Classic Light cigarettes, check. Breath mints, check. Glucose and guarana, Visine and riboflavin, Gatorade and Red Bull, mail-order porta-pissoir bags of quick-hardening gel, check.
Randolph highway patrol sunglasses, 20-gallon reserve fuel tank, Tasco 8 x 40 binoculars fitted with a Kenyon KS-2 gyro stabilizer, military spec Steiner 7 x 50 binoculars, Hummer H1-style bumper-mounted L-3 Raytheon NightDriver thermal camera and LCD dashboard screens, front-and-rear-mounted sensors for a Valentine One radar/laser detector, flush bumper-mount Blinder M40 laser jammers, redundant Garmin StreetPilot 2650 GPS units, preprogrammed Uniden police radio scanners, ceiling-mount Uniden CB radio with high-gain whip antenna. Check. Check. Check.
At the moment, the driver and copilot of this E39 BMW M5 are illegal in intent only as they obediently cow along the tip of Manhattan, funnel into the Holland Tunnel, and spill out into New Jersey along a six-lane mash-and-merge. The speedometer reads a cool 60 miles per hour; the clock reads 9:12 pm.
"Unacceptable," Alex Roy says. The 35-year-old driver is addressing both the numbers and himself. Then, after 20 sickening minutes in construction traffic, Roy says it to the darkened highway, pushing up over 110 mph while his copilot squints along the scabbed blacktop for the deer that might end their lives and the policemen who might kill their trip.
The quest itself — to cross from New York to Los Angeles with unthinkable brevity — is a drive, yes, in the same way that the moon shot was a flight. This is an engineered operation that has been financed, scenarioed, calculated, technologically outfitted, and (via digital video and triangulated time-stamped texting and GPS verification and support teams on both coasts) will be monitored and recorded (for proof, posterity, and a documentary film).
(There's more article, go read it.)
Here's the end for the lazy:
But for now, the pilot and copilot can only stand with glasses of champagne undrunk. Too tired to know if they are even happy. Or to fully comprehend that their time, 31 hours and 4 minutes coast to coast, has beaten the record by a full hour and three minutes. Or that this record will surely be beaten, again, sometime, by some other drivers, most probably for reasons they won't understand, either.
And so the clock starts and the taillights flare, and they're off again, strapped down, fueled up, and bound on an outlaw enterprise with 2,795 miles of interstate and some 31,000 highway cops between them and the all-time speed record for crossing the American continent on four wheels.
The gear is all bought and loaded. Twenty packs of Nat Sherman Classic Light cigarettes, check. Breath mints, check. Glucose and guarana, Visine and riboflavin, Gatorade and Red Bull, mail-order porta-pissoir bags of quick-hardening gel, check.
Randolph highway patrol sunglasses, 20-gallon reserve fuel tank, Tasco 8 x 40 binoculars fitted with a Kenyon KS-2 gyro stabilizer, military spec Steiner 7 x 50 binoculars, Hummer H1-style bumper-mounted L-3 Raytheon NightDriver thermal camera and LCD dashboard screens, front-and-rear-mounted sensors for a Valentine One radar/laser detector, flush bumper-mount Blinder M40 laser jammers, redundant Garmin StreetPilot 2650 GPS units, preprogrammed Uniden police radio scanners, ceiling-mount Uniden CB radio with high-gain whip antenna. Check. Check. Check.
At the moment, the driver and copilot of this E39 BMW M5 are illegal in intent only as they obediently cow along the tip of Manhattan, funnel into the Holland Tunnel, and spill out into New Jersey along a six-lane mash-and-merge. The speedometer reads a cool 60 miles per hour; the clock reads 9:12 pm.
"Unacceptable," Alex Roy says. The 35-year-old driver is addressing both the numbers and himself. Then, after 20 sickening minutes in construction traffic, Roy says it to the darkened highway, pushing up over 110 mph while his copilot squints along the scabbed blacktop for the deer that might end their lives and the policemen who might kill their trip.
The quest itself — to cross from New York to Los Angeles with unthinkable brevity — is a drive, yes, in the same way that the moon shot was a flight. This is an engineered operation that has been financed, scenarioed, calculated, technologically outfitted, and (via digital video and triangulated time-stamped texting and GPS verification and support teams on both coasts) will be monitored and recorded (for proof, posterity, and a documentary film).
(There's more article, go read it.)
Here's the end for the lazy:
But for now, the pilot and copilot can only stand with glasses of champagne undrunk. Too tired to know if they are even happy. Or to fully comprehend that their time, 31 hours and 4 minutes coast to coast, has beaten the record by a full hour and three minutes. Or that this record will surely be beaten, again, sometime, by some other drivers, most probably for reasons they won't understand, either.