Don’t watch the movie. Maybe it’s Burt Reynolds’s mustache, or maybe it’s that people no longer find it funny to laugh at the Japanese for being Japanese, but Cannonball Run just doesn’t do justice to the reality of the outlaw New York to Los Angeles races orchestrated by the late, great Brock Yates between 1971 and 1979. As Yates himself later recalled, “You had to have been there.”
Most of us now at Car and Driver weren’t, and since we live in a time of license-plate scanners and laser and radar, we look at Sammy Davis, Jr., and Dean Martin dressed as priests and can’t imagine how Peter Brock and Dick Gilmartin did exactly that, conning police with white collars, driving a press car on loan from Mercedes-Benz. The movie may not have been art, but it did imitate the lives of actual journalists, racers, and professional miscreants, and it is a story worth retelling.
Last week, some of these same outlaws, gray-haired and slowed, retold their Cannonball Run stories at a public reunion in Greenwich, Connecticut. Parked out front were a squad of Cannonballer cars, as if Bill Brodrick?a Union Oil PR rep who raced a motorhome and enjoyed a police escort into Los Angeles?would throw away his walking cane and roar onto I-95 at any minute.
It was a small but significant showing: the winning Ferrari Daytona driven by Yates and Dan Gurney in 1971; the Dodge Challenger with the “experimental Autotronics Super Snooper radar&...