The “Cannonball Run record” has been broken by a stunning new time, accomplished by going at an average speed of 98 miles per hour, three friends claim.
The old record for the Cannonball Run, or the drive from Manhattan to Redondo Beach in California, was 31 hours and 4 minutes.
The three friends claim that they accomplished the run in 28 hours and 50 minutes.
They left the Red Ball Parking Garage in Manhattan at 9:55 p.m. on Oct. 19 and arrived at the Portofino Hotel and Marina at 11:46 p.m., PDT, on Oct. 20, the friends say.
“It was an amazing and crazy trip where everything truly went more perfectly than we ever could have imagined or predicted,” wrote the friends--Ed Bolian, Dan Huang, and Dave Black--in a blog post.
They said they only stopped for a total of 46 minutes along the way, for iced coffees, driver changes, and urination. They had a moving average of 100 mph and an overall average of 98 miles per hour. They drove a Mercedes-Benz CL55 AMG. Their top speed was 158 miles per hour.
The drive started when a man from Indiana named Edwin “Cannonball” Baker drove from New York to Los Angeles in 53 hours and 30 minutes in some car called the Blue Streak, reported Jalopnik. Later, in the 1970s, an auto racer named Brock Yates conceived the “Cannonball Baker Sea-To-Shining Sea Memorial Trophy Dash,” also called the Cannonball Run, to protest highway speed limits.
The record gradually went down to the 31 hours and 4 minutes. Until, it appears, now.
Bolian hired a GPS tracking company to confirm the run, reported the Atlanta Journal Constitution. The 28-year-old is from Johns Creek, Georgia, and all three friends live in Atlanta.
“Thank you to everyone who helped us with the planning and execution of such a ridiculous endeavor,” the friends write on the blog. “There will be plenty of stories to come out over the next few months but we are pleased to be home and safe.”
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