A lanky, 28-year-old car sales director from Atlanta, together with two of his friends, now holds the record for being the the fastest man to drive across the United States. Ed Bolian shattered an old record by cruising from New York to Los Angeles in just 28 hours and 50 minutes. He covered a distance of 2,813 miles using a tweaked 2004 Mercedes-Benz CL55 AMG.
The team equipped the car with twin 22-gallon fuel tanks, GPS devices, police scanner, radar detectors, and laser jammers among others. They did not have a portable urinal with them nor a bed pan.
Bolian, who is sales director for Lamborghini of Atlanta, started the journey with Dave Black as his co-driver and Dan Huang as the support passenger from the Red Ball Parking Garage in New York on October 19 at 9:55 p.m. and arrived the next day at exactly 11:46 p.m in Redondo Beach, California, specifically at the Portofino Hotel and Marina.
Bolian and his friends broke the record set in 2006 by Alex Roy and David Maher in a souped-up BMW M5. The tandem had drven across the country in 31 hours and four minutes.
"I've thought about doing this for the last 10 years. This was always to me sort of the holy grail of American automotive culture," said Bolian in an interview.
"The trip went completely perfectly, in ways I could not have guessed. We had no traffic, no construction, no accidents, we didn't find any speed traps and had no bad weather ... It was perfection. We drove in a very careful way and we didn't do aggressive passing or do any driving on the shoulder, but in order to maintain that kind of average, you've got to go really fast.
"I don't want to come across as inciting anyone else to do this.At the end of the day, I did it for what I think it stands for -- a challenge and a piece of automotive Americana," he said.
The new record holders clocked an average speed of around 98 miles an hour and posted a top speed of 158 mph. They only stopped thrice to refuel, top up the engine oil, and get restroom breaks. The team did not give the full details of the route but disclosed that they took Route 40, which stretches across 12 states.
The journey was actually 10 years in the making for Bolian who had interviewed Brock Yates, who took 35 hours and 53 minutes to do a coast to coast run in the 1970s, in 2003 for a high school project. Yates is one of the creators of the Cannonball Run, better known as Cannonball Baker Sea-To-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash, in protest of the speed limits implemented during a stretch of oil crisis in the U.S. Bolian remembered telling the pioneer of the famous run that one day he will beat his record.
The cross country speed record run was first achieved by Edwin "Cannonball" Baker in 1933 after whom the dash was named. Baker drove a car dubbed the Blue Streak and had set a record of 53 hours and 30 minutes.
Bolian's preparations actually started in 2009 when he started to trick out the CL 55 with the best technologies to outsmart cops and have a sturdy suspension to carry the extra fuel. However, Bolian was only able to get his co-driver about six weeks prior to the trip and the support passenger about 18 hours before setting off from New York.
