A Georgia speed demon and his pals have shattered the record time for a New York to California road trip, eluding cops and traffic to make the cross-country run in an astonishing 28 hours and 50 minutes.
“I’ve wanted to break the record since I was 18 years old,” Ed Bolian, 27, the sales director for Lamborghini of Atlanta, told the car buff Web site Jalopnik.com.
He and his two-man crew tricked out a 2004 Mercedes CL55 – fitting the car with two extra 22-gallon gas tanks to go along with the Benz’s standard 23-gallon tank, a configuration that could hold 400 pounds of gasoline.
They also installed a pair of GPS units, a police scanner, three radar detectors, a laser jammer, a CB radio and a switch that would kill the car’s rear lights if the coppers were on their tail.
Bolian, co-driver Dave Black and crew manager Dan Huang left the Red Ball Parking Garage at 142 East 31st St. in Manhattan on Oct. 19 at 9:55 p.m.
They arrived at the Portofino Hotel and Marina in Redondo Beach, Calif., 28 hours and 50 minutes later – shattering the 2006 record of 31:04 set by Alex Roy and Dave Maher in a BMW M5.
“It was an amazing and crazy trip where everything truly went more perfectly than we ever could have imagined or predicted,” Bolian boasted on his own Web site.
“To beat such respectable competitors by such a sizable margin was made possible by such an amazing team and not running into any issues with traffic, construction, cops, or mechanical issues,” he added.
Bolian said their car was stopped for only 46 minutes along the entire trip, and that their average moving speed was an astounding 98 mph.
And this was in a car that already had 115,000 miles on it before they left, he said.
The crew also had to prepare for their non-mechanical needs, and stocked up the car with nutrition bars, energy drinks, and Blue Donkey Iced Coffee. They also brought extra bottles and bedpans – in case the team had to answer nature’s call on the go, Bolian said.
The adventure started off rough, with the team getting a ticket from the NYPD before they even started, while trying to find the best route out of Manhattan during a test run.
The Big Apple also slowed them down as they were hitting the road for real.
“It took us 15 minutes to get out of Manhattan,” Bolian told Jalopnik.
It was all downhill after that as they sped through Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana.
“I don’t even remember Indiana,” Bolian cracked.
The crew was aided by a series of lead cars driven by friends along the way, driving about 200 miles ahead of the speeding Benz and warning them of cops, traffic or construction in their path.
They barreled through Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, Arizona and New Mexico – states with long stretches of empty highway.
They saw plenty of cops, but managed to avoid getting busted – even though they blew by a parked police cruiser in Ohio at a head-spinning 95 mph.
Bolian said he was inspired to break the record by Brock Yates, the longtime “Car and Driver“ editor and speed freak who created the famed “Cannonball Run” race from New York to LA in the 1970s to protest highway speed limits.
“About 10 years ago I interviewed Brock Yates for a project on Automotive Journalism as a senior in high school. We talked about the business of writing about cars and his Cannonball Project. I told him that one day I would break the record,” Bolian wrote on his Web site.
“Our goal…was to pay tribute to what we consider to be one of the coolest and most interesting chapters of American automotive history,” he wrote, before offering a perfunctory warning to potential copycats.
“I do not advise that anyone attempt this or break the law in any way. This type of activity could easily have resulted in our death, imprisonment, or led to a litany of other consequences. Do Not Attempt, blah blah blah,” he wrote.
