What would pass as typical highway/interstate speeds today was bona-fide illegal during the heyday of the Cannonball Run. Not the movie, the stealth race that spanned coast-to-coast. Devised as a method of enjoying the Interstate system while at the same time taking solid aim at restrictive driving laws and later, the nationwide 55-MPH speed limit, the Cannonball Baker Sea-To-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash has become legendary, a goal for the road-going anarchist with a stopwatch and enough radar detectors to qualify as a mobile military airport. Over the years powerful sedans, exotics, daily drivers and musclecars tuned up by NASCAR royalty all took on the journey, but one vehicle stands out above the rest, namely because it was so outlandish that it was one of the strongest punchlines in the comedy movie version of the story. There was no mention about a guy in a Chevy dually threatening to bite the head off of a would-be tailgater, let alone what the second half of that threat constituted of.
For the 1979 running, Brock Yates and Hal Needham decided to go with a sure-fire way to keep cops out of their hair while screaming across the country: an ambulance. Using Yates’ wife, Pamela, as the “patient”, and Los Angeles-based Dr. Lyell Royer riding along as the team, a 1978 Dodge B200 van was ordered up in two-tone orange and white, built to kill, fitted with as much trickery as you could do in 1979 and…it didn’t finish. About fifty miles short of the finish line the van’s transmission had enough of their bullshit and packed it up in the parking lot of an inn. And that’s not even the end of the main story.
The real Dodge is lost to history…but that didn’t stop this guy from building a dead-nuts replica. And we mean detailed, with help from Brock Yates himself, detailed down to the rear-view mirrors from an Opel almost nobody remembers, with the big-block swap and the overdrive transmission and all. It’s been just as much of a pain in the ass as the original one was, but reportedly it’s got a date with destiny, to remove the DNF from the unofficial roster once and for all. Check it out!
I love that movie!
I had read the book before watching the movie, and yes, I was rather disappointed that Mad Dog was toned down in the movie compared to real life. Perhaps the changes, including replacing Mad Dog with an actor who looked nothing like him, were a case of “Details have been changed to protect the guilty”. I’m pretty sure the statute of limitations hadn’t expired on some of the “short cuts” Mad Dog used in the real race when the movie came out.
Never knew the van in the movie was actually the same van they drove until today. Really cool story.
Very cool story and I hope for his sake the real van doesn’t appear and negate all his efforts.
Geeze they lie so many times in those videos its not even funny. It’s not rebuilding when you are making it from scratch. It’s a recreation. Nothing like clickbait!