“Apex: The Secret Race Across America” is the story of the real Cannonball Run — and very real Cannonballers. The new film, directed by J.F. Musial and Cory Welles and narrated by Ice-T, tells the story of the semi-secret, dangerous, expensive and very competitive races of the ’70s and ’80s that spawned the Burt Reynolds parody that ultimately overpublicized the real event, contributing in some measurable way to its demise.
Filled with plenty of footage from the U.S. Express races and interviews with participants from those races, “Apex: The Secret Race Across America” follows Alex Roy and Dave Maher’s attempt to beat a 32 hour and 7 minute New York-to-LA record set in the last U.S. Express in 1983 by the team of Doug Turner and David Diem, who set it in a 1980 Ferrari 308. But it also tries to answer the greater questions about the event: What drives these racers to risk it all, facing arrest, sleep deprivation, mechanical breakdown and the very real risk of a crash?
We won’t spoil anything here by telling you that Roy and Maher broke the 1983 record, setting a time of 31 hours and 4 minutes on their second attempt in 2006, with filmmaker Cory Welles in the back seat to document the whole adventure. After all, Roy went on David Letterman’s show to talk about it two years later, in 2008, when the statute of limitations had expired on the vast majority of traffic laws that the two had broken. “Apex: The Secret Race Across America” is very much an update or a remix of Welles’ 2013 film “32 Hours 7 Minutes” — the two documentaries use parts of the same interviews and largely the same footage — and Welles has a directorial credit in the new film as well.
What’s different, watching this film in 2019, is contemplating how much time had passed, in terms of technology and the actual landscape, between the time that the Cannonball and U.S. Express drivers raced, and when Roy, Maher and Welles beat the 1983 record in 2006. This was one of the reasons that some observers and racers viewed the 1983 Diem/Turner record as unbreakable: They did it at the tail end of an era of rudimentary police and surveillance technology — they faced the police tech of the 1960s, really — and before the suburban sprawl had started to eat into the landscape, eliminating vast stretches of road and introducing congestion even in rural areas.
The early days of Cannonball were a rebellion against the 55-mph speed limit — and also against a lot of other things.
Roy and Maher’s 2006 record, footage from which still accounts for 70 percent of the new film, took place in a different landscape from the U.S. Express records, but the team was aided by technology that even now, just 13 years later, seems dated.
Roy’s 2006 record was before tablets, social media, GoPros, Waze, Trapster and a whole range of other technology that has since appeared. And it was also at a time before automatic license plate readers and all other sorts of surveillance tech that would have to be taken into consideration, if not countered, in 2019. Roy and Maher still set the record at a time of CB radios and bulky Blackberry phones that could really only text (when coverage permitted). So in that sense, it’s a record in the landscape the tech of the mid-2000s. In subsequent years, other teams have also broken their record, twice, whittling it down to an almost unbelievable 28 hours and 50 minutes, set in 2013 by Ed Bolian and Dave Black.
Clock time aside, is it even possible to compare the modern, post-2000 records to the U.S. Express races of the early 1980s?
Roy himself, who has addressed the issue of the passage of time, lamented in his 2008 book about the way that the technological (and actual) landscape has changed the nature of the race. Diem and Turner’s record in 1983, helped by a spotter plane, could be said to have been ahead of its time, even though most cars were filled with hundreds of pounds of communications and night-vision gear — racers preferred starting at night and pushing the speed limits in the nighttime. And Roy has indicated that the New York-to-LA race against time is as much about the tech available to the racers at the time — and the tech available to law enforcement. But like the racers of the U.S. Express, all modern teams relied on technological advances, some of which have yet to materialize — a car that can change colors, for instance.
Exotic cars were not unusual in the old Cannonball and U.S. Express races.
The late Jalopnik and Autoweek scribe Davey G. Johnson was present at the endpoint of Roy and Maher’s 2006 record and had also driven with him extensively; being a student of the coast-to-coast races, Johnson was well versed in the history and the role that technology played in the Cannonball, U.S. Express event, and the “modern” records set by Roy and others. At the time Roy’s record was broken in 2013, Johnson was surprised, to put it mildly, that such a time could be set in the landscape of 2013, and by how much time it shaved off Roy’s 2006 record, ultimately crediting the boldness of the drivers as much as the technology deployed by them.
“If it proves to be true, it’ll likely never be beaten,” Johnson said on the day the 28-hour, 50-minute record was revealed. “My bigger worry is that people will get stupid trying to.”
“Alex’s level of prep, in some ways, was overkill,” Johnson said of Roy’s 2006 record in 2013, after his record had been broken. “On the other hand, Ed’s (Bolian) clearly a student of the game; he might not have spent like Alex did, but he’s been interested in the record for nine years and there’s a lot of info that’s come out since Yates’ Cannonball book on how to do it.”
To say that this film was a long time in the making would be an understatement, but Roy’s record having been set in what is now a slightly different time helps give some perspective to the changing technological landscape — a 2019 attempt would share very little in the way of tech with Roy’s 2006 record.
The film is very sympathetic to Roy who, just like in Welles’ film seven years prior, is clearly a protagonist we’re supposed to root for. In that sense, this is not a “two sides” film that questions the safety of triple-digit speeds attained by sleep-deprived individuals trying to set a record for which there is no trophy, only a timeclock stamp and some measure of internet fame.
So is the coast-to-coast race about the racing spirit, the fame or about technology? Because — spoiler alert — there’s very little glamour involved.
Dave Maher, left, and Alex Roy, on the record-setting 2006 drive.
“I remember asking [Brock] Yates about the [Ferrari] Daytona back when Cannonball came out,” Johnson said in 2013, a day after Bolian had gone public with a new record. “The 350Z had just dropped and its performance figures weren’t markedly different from the Ferrari’s. He got this sort of dreamy look on his face and said, ‘Yeah, these new cars have the performance, but there was something about that Ferrari that just made it perfect for the trip.” In my head, I sorta discounted it as nostalgia. But looking back after my own experiences, I totally get it.'”
To those completely new of the topic, “Apex: The Secret Race Across America” will be an eye-opener about the very small community that keep the spirit of the Cannonball alive. To those who have seen Welles’ film, the new film a slicker and slightly more indulgent update that includes more footage and more interviews with participants. To those who know or have met many of the racers, witnesses and people involved, such as Autoweek staff (we carried an ad for the U.S. Express in the early ’80s — just call this number and join up!) — the film is a timely-enough look at records that are once again starting to age.
In another decade and a half, perhaps we’ll see another film directed by J.F. Musial about yet another modern record, with Roy now being the “old racer” giving the interview in his living room about how he broke it “back in the day.”
The film premieres Sunday, Oct. 20 at 7:30 p.m. on NBC Sports and will the be available on iTunes.
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