A new record in the Cannonball Run—an unsanctioned time-trial rally from New York to Los Angeles—always attracts headlines. But this week’s record-setting run is even more absurd than most. Completed in a BMW 535 diesel, driver Chris Stowell covered the 2,800-mile Cannonball in just 27 hours and 16 minutes at an average moving speed of 105 miles per hour. More ludicrously, he achieved this with no spotters, no co-driver, and only light modifications to his car. It represents the outright post-COVID-lockdown record, as well as the solo record and the diesel-car record.
A record-holding run with so little pomp and prep has me asking: why bother? The whole point of the Cannonball was to outwit and outsmart police enforcement as a team, as a means of showcasing the absurdity of cat-and-mouse speeding enforcement. If a single guy can hop in his daily-driven BMW and break the record without so much as a single ticket, what is the purpose of even running the Cannonball anymore?
Cat And Mouse
The inaugural 1971 “Cannonball Baker Sea-To-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash” was organized and driven by Car and Driver writer and race car driver Brock Yates. He conceived it as a tongue-in-cheek gonzo-journalist “protest” of the new national 55 mph speed limit. His run set the ground rules for the unsanctioned event—start at the Red Ball Garage in New York City, and end at the Portofino Inn in Los Angeles. Drive fast, don’t get arrested.
Yates’ inaugural run was completed in a Dodge Sportsman van with three other friends co-driving. The team completed the roughly 2,800-mile drive in 40 hours and 51 minutes, with an average speed of around 70 mph. The main opponent was Johnny Law, and the strategy in these days before reliable radar detectors was to keep speeds almost-sorta-reasonable, as detailed by Yates in a subsequent 1971 run:
“Speeds in excess of 100 mph… simply attract too many lawmen. The Cadillac, with five apprehensions that cost them several hours, is a perfect example of the limitations of this mode of travel.”
Runs continued on through the ’70s and early ’80s, and the basic premise of the event was turned into a trilogy of ensemble-cast blockbuster flicks, after which interest began to die off.
After several decades without attempts, the Run enjoyed renewed popularity in 2006 when a team led by automotive journalist Alex Roy broke the record with a time of 31 hours, 4 minutes. Roy spent years preparing for his record-breaking run, in which his strategy was to outwit the police entirely. The record-breaking setup was extremely polished. His modified BMW E39 M5 employed state-of-the-art radar detectors, police scanners, laser jammers, and night-vision scopes; He even worked with a highly coordinated spotting team that employed aircraft to scope out traffic and police ahead of his car.
Roy’s run was as close to Need for Speed as the real world could possibly get, and it opened the floodgates for follow-up attempts that upped the ante. Later record-holding Runners would employ vehicular disguises, brake-light kill switches, and thermal cameras to evade police.
Even as speeds climbed, Cannonballers’ focus remained mostly clear: the main opponent is Johnny Law, and please don’t kill anyone doing this.
The Mouse Has Won
This makes the 27-hour and 16-minute run set by Chris Stowell feel that much more absurd. As Stowell describes his record-breaking run, it’s clear he didn’t employ cutting-edge tech—his BMW has radar detectors and front/rear laser jammers, but that’s all. His 5 Series is a lightly tuned daily driver with an extra fuel cell in the trunk. His prep consisted primarily of driving as fast as he could from Los Angeles to Las Vegas or Phoenix. The BMW even threw a check engine light and entered limp mode early into his run, but he just cleared it and ignored the light for the rest of the drive.
On the run itself, Stowell encountered little resistance. He was pulled over once in Oklahoma after he cut off another driver who directly called the police (he got off with a verbal warning). He had a close call with a cop in California but managed to avoid a ticket by slowing down quickly. When exhaustion finally took hold—roughly 22 hours in, somewhere in Arizona—he “took a Five Hour Energy” and continued until he “got [his] second wind with it.” He did this while maintaining an overall average speed of 103 mph, including stops.
Not only does this seem vastly more dangerous than the meticulously planned runs of past drivers, it shows how absurd the Cannonball has become—because the Cannonballers won.
The original event highlighted the futility of traffic enforcement, but police have largely given up on traffic enforcement post-COVID. Traffic stops have plummeted, even by highway patrol whose sole job is to police highways. The overall rate of drivers speeding is up—as are fatal crashes where speeding was a factor. Traffic fatalities overall have skyrocketed. Adjusted for population, American roads are now more fatally dangerous than Russia’s, Venezuela’s, and Greece’s.
The reasons for this decline in enforcement and rise in speeding are complex, multifaceted, and not, of course, influenced by the Cannonball. But the Run’s “protest” still achieved its goal to defang speeding enforcement, and Stowell’s run clearly illustrates this. With very little preparation and no assistance, he managed to set a pace on public roads that could achieve a respectable finish in GTE-AM at the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
Stowell himself knows law enforcement doesn’t care. He broke tradition and publicly spoke about his run just two months after he drove it, completely unafraid of any legal repercussions in the states he tore through. Almost all past Runners wait at least a year to publicly discuss their records, so the statute of limitations for their law-breaking has passed. Stowell doesn’t seem worried about that at all.
What Is The Point?
With a record this quick—the fastest achieved outside of runs during peak COVID-era travel restrictions with no traffic—it’s time to admit that the Cannonball era is over. It has always been a dangerous endeavor, but the primary opponent now—especially to hear Stowell tell his tale—is traffic, not police. While running a Cannonball has always been for bragging rights, without a worthy opponent in the form of the law, it comes off as a completely pointless vanity project. It garners negative attention for automotive hobbyists for no reason beyond personal glory.
This isn’t in the spirit of Yates’ original run, or any of the pre-COVID record-holders’ high-tech approaches. Yates’ goal was to fight the law, and in the long run, he won. What more could future runners hope to achieve?
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