Customer comments on this selection.
 brock bored??
Thank goodness for participant submissions. They seemed to go over the same stories but they were more interesting that Brock's version.
 Very detailed
A very detailed book about the greatest race that ever was. If you are into this type of interest, then it does make you want to be there, or wish you were. Very satisfying read.
 Cheap and disappointing
I've got a pretty soft spot for the original Cannonballs, AKA "The Erwin G. "Cannon Ball" Baker Sea-To-Shining Sea Memorial Trophy Dash," held in 1971, 1972, 1975 and 1979. After all, local (to me) Hemmings Motor News publisher emeritus Terry Erich and then-editor Dave Brownell, together with Dave Justus, campaigned a 1936 Ford panel truck they called the Red Eye Express (a vehicle that today sits quite innocently just down the street from me in the Hemmings collection) in the final Cannonball. Finishing in 61 hours, 51 minutes, they have the distinction of not only finishing in almost twice the time of the winning Jaguar, but running what I believe is the oldest vehicle ever entered in the original race. That 61+ hours was also the third slowest time ever recorded.
Raised on the Roger Moore/Dom DeLuise movie, I was expecting some sort of madcap retelling of the race, full of Yates' famous rants, "quarantined crazies" and so forth. A sort of Hunter S. Thompson-meets-Vanishing Point, maybe. Alas, what I got was a lot more like a 25th college reunion: A bunch of guys who have, at best, hazy memories of two or three days in their lives a quarter-century ago. Yates assembled as many of the original participants as he could, and each wrote up a couple of pages. The whole thing was then slapped together as a book. It's not that it's bad, but it commits a far greater sin: It's dull. Some of the contributing writers are pretty good, but you usually only get a couple of pages of them before someone interested in gas mileage and average speed comes on. The craziness is there, but it's buried under many years of haze and caution. It should have been written in 1979, when the hum of the interstate and the flash of a smokies lights was still imprinted in their disco-addled brains.
cannonball
I though the book was better than the movie, because it told a lot about what happened during the race even from more points of view then the author.
 Great story!
One of my favorite memories from many years ago was the day the annual issue of Car & Driver came that covered the infamous Cannonball race. Car & Driver was always my favorite magazine, it started me going in this hobby. I also soon became a subscriber of AutoWeek (in the original "newspaper" format). Motor Trend was pretty much the same mixed bag back then as it is now, and Road & Track was something I hadn't yet fully learned to appreciate.
I wasn't even driving when the Cannonball races started... but they were definitely a bad influence on me later. When I did finally get my license, I took up TSD rallying.. and once I learned to drive them to proper speed and not to a replay of the Cannonball, I did fairly well.
All true automotive enthusiasts know a little something about this legendary race. When friends gather to talk about the greatest things in the car hobby, this is inevitably one of the topics.
If you've never heard of the Cannonball, you've got some reading to do. The Cannonball was a flat-out wide-open road race on public roads - from New York City to Los Angeles. There were no rules, except that you couldn't board a plane! You, and whomever else could fit into the vehicle, had to drive coast-to-coast with only gas and (perhaps, as there are methods to bypass the need for) pit stops! Top competitors completed the drive in 30+ hours in specially prepared cars - cars that had a high top end or where specially prepared in some other way (enormous gas tanks, painted to resemble cop cars, even an ambulance). This was serious stuff, and it was totally illegal.
Brock tells us that the race was originally conceived to make a point against raising government levels of interference, specifically on the highways. But, when the race was first run, as Brock points out in the book, traffic radar was experimental, the insurance companies hadn't yet figured out how to screw you over for infractions outside of your home state, and the highways themselves were fundamentally more isolated and wide open than they are today. Those were the days!
Sadly, as Brock reminds us, there is no possible way you could do something like this today, indeed even the last one was run in 1979 it was entirely clear that an era was over forever. And that's the way I look back at a lot of stuff from the 50s, 60s, and early 70s. Much of it predated me, nearly all of it predated my involvement in this hobby (other than waiting for that great day every month when Car & Driver would arrive in the mail - as I still do). That was a special and unique time, there will never be anything like that again. There won't ever again be an idea as original as a Shelby Cobra, as the original Mustang, or as the Cannonball.
The book itself is an absolute requirement for the library of all automotive enthusiasts. It's a bit rambling at times, but it's also filled with reprints from the best of the Car & Driver articles of that time, along with commentary and stories by Brock that have never been told before. Just as good are the stories of some of the most famous drivers of these events - such as Dan Gurney. Dan tells his story in his own words - and he is as much a classic of that era (one never to be duplicated) as is the race itself. Dan and Brock were co-drivers of a Ferrari Daytona, arguably the most famous of all the cars that competed.
One of the later drivers was Hal Needham, and that was the beginning of the end. If traffic laws and enormously increased police presence didn't kill this era, then Hal Needham's Cannonball Run movies certainly did. This was the end of the road for these events, satirizing them and making them out to be something that was little more than a clown event. To his credit, Hal did co-drive with Brock - in the infamous ambulance with Brock's wife Pam playing the "victim".
If ever there was a reasonably honest depiction of the Cannonball races in film, it was "The Gumball Rally". It's one of my favorite movies. Unfortunately, Brock was on a (thankfully temporary) downhill slide back then and his response to that film was to look into suing it's makers. In the end, he has refused to see it - ever.
The 15 minutes of fame of Brock's movies are long over, but the race itself will always be here. And, this excellent book is the insider story of it.
|
