Every spring, a collection of racing enthusiasts assembles to pay homage at the altar of the Cannonball Run. Only they don't stop at any shrines to the legendary coast-to-coast, no-holds-barred race. They drive a 3,000-mile loop, stopping at racetracks at intervals, for a bit of friendly competition. They drive One Lap of America.
All sorts of people show up, driving all kinds of cars. For the past several years, a contingent of Nissan GT-Rs and souped up Corvettes have been among the top contenders for overall scoresheet dominance. But there are also Porsche 911s, turbocharged Subarus and BMWs, among others, on the entrant list. At this year's One Lap, those cars were joined by a pair of Ultima GTRs – an exotic supercar if ever there was one – an Ariel Atom, and a trio of Chevrolet HHRs.
As unlikely as the retro HHRs were at a performance event, there was another car no would have expected. It wasn't the retired Ford Crown Victoria police cruiser driven by Don Kahn and Chris Lindley, it was a massive, green 1977 Ford Country Squire station wagon. It was wood-paneled and outfitted with a Wonder Bread-soft suspension that made it wallow around turns, and a wheezy 168-horsepower 400-cubic-inch V-8 engine. According to automobile-catalog.com's list of specifications for the car, it had a 13.9-second 0-to-60 time and a top speed of 103 mph when it was new. In other words, it was no one's idea of a performance car.
Yet, it some ways, even though it was the butt of a lot of good-natured jokes, the huge wagon was the spirit of the race.
"It doesn't matter what you're driving – a Porsche or the Griswold family truckster," said Brock Yates Jr., who has been running One Lap for the past several years. "Everyone has fun."
The car – which, semi-"Vacation"-style, had bicycles mounted on a rack on the rear tailgate during the event's long highway transit sections – was piloted by Kent Mckay and his three sons, Eric, Justin and Michael. All are Nebraska natives, and their Cornhusker license plate read "GRISWOLD."
"I like the event's 'run what you brung' style," Eric Mckay said. "What other track event would even let someone race a Country Squire wagon?"
Unlike its spiritual predecessor – the Cannonball Baker Sea-To-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash, which was run several times, unofficially, throughout the 1970s – One Lap is completely legal. This year, participants started at the Tire Rack headquarters in South Bend, Ind., drove toward Denver, then down to Texas, and finally, up through Oklahoma, Missouri and Kentucky on the way back up to South Bend. They flogged the cars at seven tracks along the journey.
If you're not familiar with the Cannonball, or haven't seen the Burt Reynolds movie, it was a "gentlemen's race" of sorts organized by a motorsports journalist and fast car junkie named Brock Yates. Initially, the idea was to break the coast-to-coast record, which stood at 53 hours and 30 minutes since Erwin George "Cannon Ball" Baker made the trip in a Graham-Paige model 57 Blue Streak 8 in 1933.
Yates, his son, Brock Yates, Jr., and two others set a new record of 40 hours and 51 minutes on a trial run in May 1971. It was broken later that year when Dan Gurney made the crossing in 35 hours and 54 minutes in a Ferrari Daytona, and finally – for Cannonballers, anyway – in 1979, by Dave Heinz and Dave Yarborough, who drove a Jaguar XJS to a 32-hour, 51-minute finish. (The record has been broken again a few times in recent years, but it's not the '70s anymore, and Reynolds never starred in a movie about those guys, so who's counting anyway?)
One Lappers, though, are not out to break the continental crossing record, in particular since Johnny Law came down hard on people with dreams of doing the same once the peculiar wave of '70s free-for-all-dom broke. So the elder Yates started One Lap in 1984 to give his go-fast compatriots, and the starry-eyed acolytes who pined to follow in his footsteps, an outlet for their high-speed wanderlust.
If One Lap is similar to the Cannonball in spirit, it's different in layout and logistics. But having a car that would make the legendary trip those irreverent pioneers made in the '70s definitely helps. Between each track session – there are usually a total of six hot laps at each stop – lie hundreds of miles of open road. The car each team chooses has to be durable above all else, as evinced by the handful every year who fall out and have to scrape their crippled vehicles off the road and back to wherever home is.
A bone-stock malaise-era station wagon, in other words, is not at the top of the list most participants have in their minds concerning cars that will make the trip. But the Mckay-mobile trudged dutifully through the whole slog, its exhaust whisper quiet as the engine struggled to heft two-and-a-half tons of union-made steel up steep mountain grades.
"A lot of people who saw the wagon shared memories it brought back from their youth," Mckay said. "I got to show off and tell the story of the wagon at least two or three times a day, and felt like the curator of a museum piece."
The Mckays said another among the car's positive attributes was its comfortable ride. The dark green couches inside the car were much better suited to luxuriant long-distance lounging than the firm Recarro race seats in many of the more competitive cars. They weren't the first to think of that, though. Even among Cannonballers there were those who placed comfort over competition. But when you have to drive anywhere from 200 to 600 miles in one go, wouldn't anyone at least consider pushing the balance in that direction?
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