The Official 32 Hours 7 Minutes Film Production Blog
Brock Yates and Hal Needham, accompanied by Brock’s wife, Pamela, and a doctor friend named Lyle Royer, ran the 1979 Cannonball in an ambulance. Yes. It’s true. Their souped-up Dodge “TransCon Medivac” carried a modified 440 Chrysler Magnum, high-speed shocks and sway bars, a 60 gallon fuel tank, and a whole crap-load of flashing lights, medical gear, stickers, uniforms, etc.
I’ve always wanted to be out on the lamb, running from the cops, and just generally being a badass. Unfortunately, I have a bad knee and am scared of high speeds. Instead, I try to live vicariously through the participants of the U.S. Express.
Continue reading ‘Wanted for being an Extreme Badass: David Morse’
This is a great one from some boys in the US Express:
"The sneaky-Pete award went to a last minute entry: George Lloyd from Austin, and his clever partner Ron Docie, from LA. George and Ron left M.Y. with a six-hour-old new rear-end in a Turbo Trans Am."
Imagine coming across this puppy while searching for free pencil-sharpeners in the Daily Examiner and saying, "yeah, jeez, that does sound like a good idea. Count me in!" I can’t imagine that because I’m soft, but I do think it’s pretty cool that this was just slotted in there with the rest of the junk you might want to fill your attic with.
Putting oneself through a sleepless high-speed coast-to-coast dash is a Herculean challenge to both mind and body. The men and women who competed in the transcontinental races in the 70′s and 80′s all shared an unequivocable passion: to push themselves to the utter limit of their sport. One racer, George Egloff, stands out to me (and to most of the other competitors) as a sort of icon in the sport of long distance driving….
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What? I don’t look serious to you?
Alex had a night-vision thermal camera installed into the grill of the M5. The initial thought was driving at night, sans lights of any sort, using only an in-dash screen, and thus obtaining ultimate stealth. This turned out to be super dangerous. Surprise! The camera wasn’t deemed useless, though, as they could still spot a cop hiding in a highway median in the dark of night. Another more aggressive option that some drivers employed back in the Cannonball and Express days was night vision goggles/binoculars. The maniac pictured above used infra-red goggles while at the wheel in the 4-ball rally, an early 80’s Express knock-off run from Boston to San Diego. Call me crazy, but this, for some reason, also looks incredibly dangerous.
photo: [Road-Race Outlaws, The Plain Dealer, 9/18/83]
In early November 2005, 32 Hours 7 Minutes director Cory Welles screened a rough cut in NYC for Alex Roy, Team Polizei’s fearless captain and experienced rally driver. By mid-December, 2005, little more than one month later, Welles and Roy, along with his co-pilot Jon Goodrich, set out to see if this 20+ year old cross-country driving record was real – and maybe even breakable – today.
Are you freaking kidding me with this one? I want one of these. And I’m not driving a million miles an hour in a 55mph zone. This is a "ticket" Mack Howard got in his ’82 US Express run. Granted he received 2 actual tickets within 3 hours of this warning, but still…
Most of you car-folk out there have heard of the Cannonball Run races that took place throughout the 70’s. But you are much less likely to have heard of the US Express, another coast to coast race that existed for four years following the last Cannonball in 1979. Very little information exists about it today due to the highly secretive and serious nature of the race, but it is this race upon which 32 Hours 7 Minutes is based.
