The Cannonball Record has been broken again
roadandtrack.com
roadandtrack.com
It's hard not to become overconfident and over-reliant on technology and subsequently assume your driving skills are close to perfection, without even realizing that even the perfect driver cannot avoid all the other drivers' mistakes.
This is an achievement but it's performed under different conditions than any other driver attempting it will encounter. Getting the record because the police just felt more laid back that night for example is like beating up an old Muhammad Ali and saying you must be the best boxer.
One can't realistically ask people to only ever do what's safe.
As a species we're built to operate at certain risk level. If you track the risks of business, leisure, travel, etc., through ages and cultures, they do show remarkable stability. As soon as better technology, organization, skills, and so on come along, people start going faster, harder, further, more intensely and such.
You can make superficially reasonable arguments, but you can't change the fact that risk-taking is necessary for gains. This observation is built into our, humans, very nature, and everybody has a natural grasp of it.
It's dangerous -- primarily to them -- but I can't help but admire and respect what they've done.
As to the top speed -- there are areas in the West where you can see tens of miles with absolutely nothing on either side of the road.
They're endangering everyone on the road with them. No one would care if the drivers were the only ones in danger.
I do not disagree at all. I am just confused on why this is 'romanticized' and 'published'. If I went and robbed my neighbor of $10k in a record breaking "quick" fashion, would I get journalists at my door looking to publish articles around it?
"But they could have..."
But they didn't. Nor have the many who came before. The risk profile of these guys is less than someone who is checking a text while driving.
(Okay, a tiny, tiny minority of drivers never break the law. They are the extreme exception)
1) Even on the parts of the autobahn with unrestricted speeds, 130km is still the recommended upper limit, and you're more liable in a collision if you go faster than that.
2) Many people in Germany don't agree with unrestricted speeds, and politicians have compared it to gun law debates in the US.
3) Germany has higher than average deaths per 1000 km driven (for an EU country).
Source?
On Wikipedia similar data doesn't seem like confirming this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
The referenced paper:
https://www.itf-oecd.org/sites/default/files/docs/irtad-road...
(page 21) places Germany as "better" than Netherlands, France, Austria and Belgium (the latter is on par with the US)
I don’t care if they destroy their own cars but in reality they will destroy other people's cars. You also can't expect other people who do their daily driving to account for idiots going at such high speed. Just a stupid and reckless thing to do. With all the Twitter shaming going on for minor offenses these guys deserve a major shaming.
I couldn't care less if they're killed--they're clearly asking for it. It's the innocent bystanders that will inevitably die that concerns me.
I'm not sure that it will last much longer that Electric Cannonball Runs will focus more on speed limit following, but I hope that it does. It's a better sport that way that it is more "gentlemanly".
It's one thing to drive your car into a tree in the middle of nowhere at 120mph, quite another if you drive it into someone else obeying the speed limit and going about their day.
Rolling eyes. Going insanely fast sustained > 100mph and putting other peope's life in danger I agree with. The drive being a detectable impact on the environment I'm suspect.
> “The other responses will be from another crowd—Cannonballers and motorheads of all stripes who believe that driving skill, and not traffic law, is more beneficial to actual safety than simply slowing down. From this side of the aisle there will be unadulterated joy that such a cross-country time has been posted, as well as begrudging appreciation from former record holders and disappointed fanatics who may have been planning record runs of their own...”
> Was it a good idea? No. It never has been and it never will be. But like Everest, it presents itself as a risky challenge that is, to some, irresistible.
To those who think it was irresponsible to attempt such a feat, a lot of what we do as humans—at our best—is frankly irresponsible. Humans acting perfectly responsibly, obeying all the laws of their local jurisdiction, never willing to put themselves and even perhaps others in harms way, and worried more about their carbon footprint than whether they can accomplish some mythical (to them) feat...
I imagine that without the traits that lead to these types of attempts, and without a society that is willing to at least tolerate (if not celebrate) their achievements, we would lose out on a lot of inventions, discoveries, freedoms and social progress that stems from people with the same basic instinct to leave a dent.
Whereas Cannonballers risk the lives of everybody sharing the road with them. Ie, regular drivers who have not agreed to let someone charge up behind them at >100 mph.
https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2018/04/14/599417489/...
Cannonball participants are taking large risks, and are imposing those risks on many, many people who have no real way to avoid them. This is unkind and immoral.
When I was younger, I did a lot of speeding on Interstates (US). I had a fancy radar detector, and I was almost never ticketed. Part of getting away with it, though, is doing it when you're mostly alone on the highway. Driving much, much faster than the cars around you is both reckless and terrifying; the risks are enormous.
(Interestingly, my preferred highway pace back then was 75-80MPH. Now, when I drive on the Interstate, I'm nearly always going this fast or nearly this fast, but in the interim speed limits have risen on these open stretches of highway such that 75 is probably not even "ticketable" anymore; in some places, it's actually legal.
Therefore it's hard for me to say that my middle-aged increased law-abiding nature is due to maturity, or the fact that the speed limits have mostly risen to the speeds I was driving at anyway.)
Our number of deadly car accidents per capita are one of the lowest world-wide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
Granted, they were probably driving on roads where it really was risky, but I'm always amazed the American speed limits are as low as they are, especially since there are so many long stretches of straight highway.
You want to cut road mortalities? Get all the cops off the interstate and issuing tickets to texters and ppl speeding inside the cities.
One proof - Swiss have often direct votes on important matters, and country runs like... swiss clock. Give British, often considered reasonable folks, a public vote on an important matter, and we have Brexit.
But driving with an average speed of 165Km/h takes a huge toll on concentration. You have to expend a lot of mental and physical effort to be constantly vigilant at those speeds for hours on end, something the regular Autobahn driver doesn't have to do because they can just slow down a bit and move one lane to the right.
Did you forget what article you were commenting on?
I wonder if there is much overlap in the group that is bullish about the risks for each.
>a lot of what we do as humans—at our best—is frankly irresponsible
There's no responsibility without risks. If anything, responsibility is in the conscious & reasoned risk-taking, having prepared to clean up or nullify any negative side-effects.
>obeying all the laws of their local jurisdiction
Speed limits are set at 85 percentile of traffic's speed[1]. Without the speeders we'd be having even more regressive speed limits.
The run was a good idea, and I am looking forward for the next attempt.
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limit#Maximum_speed_limi...
When I am driving on the highway and I see a pair of headlight way back, I can assume they're doing 60-80 and make a judgement as to whether is safe to change lanes. If that person is violating all social norms and doing 160, then my decision to change lanes could end up with them rearending me due to my complete inability to guess they they are acting in an extremely selfish and antisocial way. They could be the best drivers in the world with millisecond reaction times, but at some point, physics won't allow you to stop in time.
These are just a couple of rich dudes who feel their money and technical skill makes them above the law.
This is a bunch of bullshit. If you lose your grip climbing Everest, you don't crush a family sedan when you hit.
"Corzine's car was doing 91 mph before crash" - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-corzine/corzines-car-was-...
>Corzine was not wearing a seat belt, the statement said, confirming earlier statements by Corzine’s officials.
I guess it's congratulations to the team, but I would never endorse such record attempts. It's just to dangerous to do.
When the police on the radio don't know the make and model because they removed all the Mercedes Benz badges and covered the carbon fiber is great. "A silver passenger car..."
The typical MB front (the grill) would still make it easily recognizable, but at the speeds they are driving I doubt many people had time to take a look at the front.
I hope they have good long think about why they chose to endanger everyone they passed for some silly record.
I wouldn't (couldn't?) do it, but there are people who are amazing drivers. The difference between most drivers and someone who just cares about driving as a skill is huge. These guys are the cream of the crop.
Plus they had taken precautions that are insane to avoid collisions. Heat detecting cameras to avoid deer? Do you know how hard it is to stop in time after spotting a deer?
These guys are far less likely to crash then someone on their cellphones.
Yes, that is also dangerous and anti-social, but I don't see how it makes what they did less dangerous.
It's dangerous not because they're bad drivers, they're not, it's because no one else is expecting a car to come barreling up from behind them at 120mph.
And yes, thankfully no one has been hurt yet, but it's a totally unnecessary risk for some silly record.
I'm curious if this is true. If there was a high speed crash anywhere along that path, the best move for the driver is to definitely not mention they were doing the Cannonball Run. Participating in the Cannonball Run is a guaranteed way to get 0 sympathy from a jury for a civil claim, and get the max sentence from a judge for whatever criminal charges you'll be facing.
I think it's entirely possible people have been hurt/killed without much fuss getting linked to the race.
It’s too bad the comments here are almost all the same pearl clutching, even if someone else has already said it, and the article starts and ends with discussions of whether it is dangerous or condoned that is more in depth already anyway.
...but four people died in a (legal!) Cannonball event in Australia in 1994. Two were contestants, two were race officials.
I've driven cross country a few times and I was always happy if I could average more than 50mph over any long amount of time driving. I can't understand how they averaged 103, that really seems impossible without getting incredibly lucky!
First, they minimized their stops to four fuel stops.
Second, when they were moving, they were moving FAST whenever possible. Well north of 100 mph.
At a minimum they should deactivate their airbags and safety belts to make sure they themselves get hurt when something happens.
The fuel cell is a catalytic converter of chemical to electrical energy. The hydrogen for it comes from what is called -- even in an interplanetary spacecraft -- a tank.
Calling an auxiliary gas tank a fuel cell has to have originated as some kind of cheesy marketing ploy, to make it sound like a more sophisticated thing than a gas can with baffles, and get more money for it.
Cell. From Latin cella (“chamber, small room, compartment”)
biological cell? chamber with biological goop jail cell? chamber with convict inside it fuel cell? chamber with fuel in it electrochemical cell? chamber with electrodes and an electrolyte in it
fuel cell (again)? What do we name an electrochemical cell whose reactants are fluids? fuel cell!
Definitions change according to the topic of the conversation. In this context the "cell" containing fuel is a very highly engineered containment cell to ensure fuel isn't spilled or explodes in case of a high energy collision.
Maybe not worth the extra cost of all the work required to absolutely fill the trunk with fuel? 22 minutes spent refueling is incredibly low either way.
It was mentioned in an article about Bolian's run that they were able to pull up between two pumps, start them both, and run one into the car's tank and the other into the trunk-mounted fuel cell at the same time. Double the gallons per minute means half the time wasted!
I don't know if Toman/Tabbutt/Chadwick did that, but even at the same old gallons-per-minute, it means less time pulling into and out of a station, and is still valuable. Five more fuel stops at five minutes a piece would account for about half the difference between Bolian and Toman.
(I would assume this is where their spotters helped too...to make sure there were two available and functioning pumps. Probably even to have credit cards swiped and ready to go as soon as they pulled into the station.)
Note that they start in NYC just past midnight, therefore they arrived in LA before 4:30 am. You can't really do better then that for traffic.
> In all, they managed to rustle up 18 lookouts along the run. These were people who drove hundreds of miles in many cases just to scout the road ahead of the fast-moving AMG for a stretch and let the team know of any police activity or other hazards ahead.
And, of course, they were familiar with that idea from the classic movie "Smokey and the Bandit" as referenced in the article, so they probably had a good reason for not doing it that way. I'd guess that hiring a caravan of people willing to get jail time, lose their licenses, and having their expensive, fast cars seized would be really, really expensive and would only keep a few officers busy for a few minutes. Plus, in hindsight, they were successful without it.
However, I find the downvotes on your comment interesting having read the "Help me ask 'Why you didn't just'" article posted yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21675717
You met several of the criteria for reducing the insult factor: Your comment is impersonal, forward-looking, and not condescending, without being passive-agressive. But you were still downvoted.
Motor-bikes, -cars, -boats, -whatever. A large part of the HN crowd doesn't like them. HN also has healthy minority who are motor-heads, so it balances out.
Almost guaranteed this thing had a hacked up EFI modification done by some tuner... those guys never really know what they're doing, AMG/Mercedes almost certainly won't share how that computer works since modifying it on a street car almost certainly is illegal and will cause the car to fail inspection.
In general it is always interesting most of these guys seem to be from NYC and born into privilege in a car dealership family. Alex Roy fit that model. It seems like you need to be born into that privilege to end up being a professional race car driver but you also have to have more talent and hard work. The cannonball stuff seems like some kind of 2nd tier automotive fame seeking. When I was into racing & stuff I'd meet tons of guys who all thought skill was more important than following the law.. but none of them were that successful in competition and all of them had plenty of accidents.
Even if you don't find any of this interesting Alex Roy's book is a great read.
Having once rode a motorcycle 1000 miles in well under 24 hours I get the appeal of this but not the super illegal speeds.
The increasing use of electronics and internet to escape detection is pretty interesting.
> Almost guaranteed this thing had a hacked up EFI modification done by some tuner... those guys never really know what they're doing, AMG/Mercedes almost certainly won't share how that computer works since modifying it on a street car almost certainly is illegal and will cause the car to fail inspection.
You sure as hell don't know what you're talking about either, because most of the tunes don't touch the software as much as they change "maps" or the data tables that the ECU uses for fueling/AFR, ignition timing, cam profile (VANOS/VVT/VVL etc.).
The tunes themselves don't result in a failed inspection (I own a tuned BMW N54 motor myself, that passes inspection without any hacks) but if you're generating enough boost, it may be necessary to remove the catalytic converters in the downpipes after turbos for a smoother flow which results in a failed inspection. Most modern inspections rely on the ECU to report a failed/missing catalytic converter so getting around the inspection is an easy task for someone inclined to remove downpipe cats.
As for electronics, what sort of upgrades are you imagining? A handbuilt AMG engine already has all the trick things you'd want for engine management any way.
In the US, speed limit laws are administered by states, under state jurisdictions.
[0] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-statute-of-limitations-for...
If you were a member of say, the Utah State Police, and you saw this article, what would you do? Ok, a photo claims these guys drove cross-country averaging 103mph with a top speed of 193mph. Can you prove they didn't slow down to the speed limit while they were in Utah and only drove incredibly fast in the other states? Also, which one of these guys was actually driving while they were in Utah?
I believe the police would have to cite a specific individual for driving at an illegal speed at a specific location within their jurisdiction. Sort of like how everybody new Al Capone was a mob boss, but it was a struggle to actually charge him with a specific crime.
Don't commit massive crimes then brag about it on the internet.