Why would anyone drive across the United States as fast as possible with no promise of a reward? I once did it, and I don’t have a real answer.
We might ask Brock Yates, now almost 80, because he completed such a run four times and failed on a fifth try because of mechanical gremlins. Moreover, he convinced more than 300 co-conspirators to join him. Yates earned a large and loyal following during the decades he was a semi-outlaw columnist at Car and Driver, and was one of the talents that once made Car and Driver a synonym for erudite outrageousness.
Yates is less well known as a dedicated reader of history, which he is, but it was this facet of his many-sided personality that led him to discover a man named Erwin Baker.
Baker, who drove and finished the 1922 Indianapolis 500 and won the first motorcycle race ever held at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, became famous for making non-stop trips across the country. His first, on an Indian motorcycle, came in 1914 and took 11 days. In 1915, he drove from Los Angeles to New York in a Stutz Bearcat, again taking about 11 days and helping him earn his nickname of “Cannonball.”
In 1933, Baker drove a Model 57 Graham-Paige from New York to Los Angeles, taking 53 hours and 30 minutes. He did it by himself, taking one restorative 30-minute nap during the trip. This record, which had stood for 40 years, piqued Yates’s interest.
Never one to waste an opportunity for controversy, Yates wrote of the trip in Car and Driver. Not unexpectedly, he got mail, much of it from enthusiasts who wanted to try the run themselves. Accordingly, a second Cannonball was set for November 15, 1971.
Cannonball II attracted eight entries, including the Polish Racing Drivers of America. The PRDA, and a team from Little Rock, Arkansas, each fielded vans containing enough gasoline to blow up the Red Ball Garage, the starting point on Manhattan’s East 31st Street.
Yates and racing driver Dan Gurney entered a dark blue Ferrari Daytona in the event, now formally named the Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash. In a bravura performance, the two won the race with a time of 35 hours and 54 minutes. A Cadillac finished third and would have won, had its team not paused during the event to deal with a half-dozen speeding tickets. The PRDA was second.
That Cannonball produced the famous single rule that governed the run: There are no rules.
A Time magazine article in May of 1975 gave the event the cachet of reality, if not respectability, and helped spawn at least two movies that effectively, and tastelessly, ripped off Yates’s idea.
Yates had planned to end the Cannonball at that point, but the movies, continuing pressure from the automotive nut world, and his irrepressible sense of fun, led Yates to schedule what would be the last Cannonball for 1979. Among the pressures that encouraged Yates was film director Hal Needham’s decision to do a movie about the “real” Cannonball.
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