They Were There: Cannonball Run Racers’ Outlaw Tales (and a New Movie!)

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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” that Yates drove the following year; a 1971 Porsche 911 owned and driven by Road & Track photographer Bill Warner; a 1979 Chevrolet Malibu with a NASCAR fuel cell; and a replica of the fake Dodge ambulance Yates drove with his wife, Pamela, who pretended to be a patient on life support.

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Their stories, some of them unpublished, are worth retelling:

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Judy Stropus was part of an all-woman team who went braless in a Cadillac limo. Unfortunately, they suffered the event’s only crash when the driver fell asleep at the wheel. “You’ve never seen a Cadillac limousine roll so many times uphill,” she said. “We all lived.”

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Warner’s Porsche had a 31-gallon fuel tank that “splayed the front wheels.” It’s looking much better now. “At Road & Track, we thought decorum was more important than winning, so we ran at 85 to 90 mph,” Warner said. His wife told him not to come home after reading his name in the local newspaper. (His high-school nickname, Captain Marvel, inspired the movie’s Captain Chaos ambulance driver.)

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A 27-foot motorhome, driven by former C/D managing editor Rich Taylor at speeds up to 105 mph, suffered lasagna damage: “When you have five men in a motorhome for several hours and you drop Italian food all over the floor and you muck about in it, I can tell you it’s a serious issue,” he said.

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Pamela Yates used the occasion to announce she is behind a third Cannonball Run movie, to be produced by Warner Brothers with a $ 100 million budget, and that Hugh Jackman, not Robert De Niro, is to play Enzo Ferrari in a film based on her husband’s biography. Also up for grabs in a charity auction was possibly the most expensive copy of C/D ever, an August 1975 issue featuring a Cannonball cover that went for $ 350. (For that same money, you could subscribe to C/D for another 35 years. Just sayin’.) An original Cannonball “Challenger” jacket worn by C/D editor-in-chief Bob Brown sold for $ 850.

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Brock Yates, 1933–2016

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The Last Cannonball

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The Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash

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Among road-rage stories, it doesn’t get much better than the one about Dennis “Mad Dog” Menesini, who disconnected the brake lights on his Chevy dualie pickup (with 165 gallons of fuel on board) to surprise a couple of kids in a trailing car. In retaliation, they threw a beer bottle at his truck. Menesini reported the car to police on his CB radio, only they were both pulled over. With the officer finding the truck had working brake lights, Menesini asked if he could say a few words to the other driver.

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“I stuck my business card in his mouth and said, if you want to fuck with me, you’ve got my number,” he said, after recalling how he crashed through a highway barrier at the race start. “And then I’m gonna bite off your head and shit in the hole.”

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It’s probably best we weren’t there.

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