Now I Know More by Dan Lewis Read Free Book Online Page B

returned to the public eye. The oil shortage led to the creation of a national minimum-speed law of fifty-five miles per hour in hopes of curtailing oil use. In protest, a group of car aficionados organized “Cannonball Run,” a cross-country race, as reported by ABC News.
    Cannonball Run (which inspired the 1981 movie of the same name) didn’t require race organizers or the like—participants just needed to drive from Manhattan to the Portofino Hotel in the Los Angeles area and keep verifiable track of the time. Over the past forty or so years, Baker’s record has been replaced many times over. In 1983, two men made the trip in thirty-two hours and seven minutes in a Ferrari 308. That mark stood until 2006, when a guy named Alex Roy led a team that did the trip in thirty-one hours and seven minutes.
    Bolian smashed that time.
    His attempt in 2013 began a year and a half earlier with the purchase of a Mercedes CL55 AMG. As Jalopnik reported, the car was a good starting point but needed work to make a clearly illegal road trip in record time. First, Bolian added two twenty-two-gallon gas tanks, nearly tripling the car’s standard capacity, and a pair of GPS units to make sure he knew where he was at all times. (If one failed, he had a backup.) Most of the work was done to avoid the authorities. The car had multiple iPhone and iPad chargers, allowing for the use of speed trap-dodging apps; a pair of laser jammers (the radar jammer he ordered wasn’t finished in time), a kill switch for the rear lights, and three radar detectors. He also added a CB radio so he could ask trucks to slow down in order to pass them—masquerading, via radio, as a trucker himself.
    He didn’t make the trip alone, of course. He had a codriver, whom he recruited only a few weeks before the run, and a spotter in the back seat—his job was to watch for cops and calculate fuel needs—who joined the team just days before the record-breaking attempt. On October 19, 2013, the trio left Manhattan . . .
    . . . and promptly got stuck in traffic. It took fifteen minutes to get off the island.
    Nevertheless, it was basically smooth sailing from there on out. Over the next twenty-eight hours and change, the trio sped their way to the greater Los Angeles area, averaging—averaging!—ninety-eight miles per hour the entire time. Yes, that includes gas and bathroom breaks.
    BONUS FACT
    In 2011, a pair of New Yorkers made another notable trans-America trip—a slow one, taking six days and costing them thousands of dollars. As the Daily Mail reported, two guys hailed a taxi outside of New York City’s LaGuardia Airport and negotiated a deal with the cab driver to drive them all the way to L.A. at the discounted rate of $5,000. (By mileage, the fare should have been at least twice that.) Why? One of the two passengers was the son of a former cabbie and wanted to show his dad that you could, in fact, hail a taxi to take you to California—he figured actually making the trip was the best proof.

LIFE IN THE FAST LANE
WHY RICH PEOPLE SHOULDN’T SPEED IN FINLAND
    Speeding may earn you a ticket. In most cases, it will cost you maybe $150 in America or 100 Euros in Europe. For many people, that could be the difference between making this month’s rent and being in arrears. For others, it’s barely noticeable.
    So Finland tried to fix it. Which is why, in 2001, Finland fined Anssi Vanjoki, a high-paid Nokia executive, more than $100,000 for driving seventy-five kilometers per hour (forty-seven miles per hour) in a fifty-kph (thirty-one-mph) zone.
    In 1921, Finland adopted a “day-fine” law, which aimed to apply the ecumenical effect of incarceration to petty violations such as littering and minor traffic violations. Finland noted that jail time hit the rich and poor roughly equally; for each day in prison, the convict lost a day of freedom, whether rich or poor. Fines, the government concluded,