Photos Courtesy of Mecum Auctions, Inc.
- Jack May and co-driver Rick Cline, both SCCA racers, won the Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining Sea Memorial Trophy Dash in 1975.
- The duo set a winning time of 35:53, driving from the Red Ball Garage in New York City to the Portofino Inn in Los Angeles.
- They drove May’s 1973 Dino 246 GTS, which sold at the Mecum auction in Monterey for $660,000 (including buyer’s premium).
Fifty years after a record-breaking cross-country drive, Jack May finally sold his winning 1973 Dino 246 GTS. May is now 89 years old, and his longtime mechanic, June Gilliam [seen driving the car with May alongside in the photo above], is also looking to retire. But before the car crossed the block at the Mecum auction in Monterey, we spoke with Jack about his adventure.Courtesy of Jack MayApril 25, 1975: Jack May and co-driver Rick Cline celebrate their cross-country record of 35 hours, 53 minutes in the Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash.C/D: Why did you want to do the Cannonball?Jack May: Because I figured I could drive it faster than anyone had driven it before. Did you purchase the Dino specifically to drive it in the Cannonball? No, I did not. I’d owned the Dino for not quite two years when the Cannonball came about. I didn’t even know about the Cannonball when I bought the Dino.And concurrently, I owned a Ferrari Daytona, so I had a decision of which car to take. The Daytona, being red and loud, would stand out in any crowd. But the Dino was quiet and low and a little more inconspicuous. So, we decided to take the Dino. And the difference in top speed of 35 miles an hour or 25 miles an hour was not a significant difference. What did you do to the car to prepare the car for the event? I put on some extra driving lights. I put in a fuel tank in the trunk, a 15-gallon racing fuel cell. And got a CB radio. That was it. Just a plain stock Dino.I saw I see in the pictures, the tach looks like it’s twisted a little bit. Yeah, when you sit in the Dino, if you’re gonna drive it hard, you really can’t see [the tach needle] when it gets up into the redline area, so I turned it. It was easy to turn.Photos Courtesy of Mecum Auctions, Inc.What time did you leave from the Red Ball garage? You could leave any time, I think between six and midnight. Being a greenhorn, one of the things I thought was, I’ll leave it late, and I’ll get out of New York traffic a lot quicker. That was a bad decision because you arrived in Los Angeles at rush hour. The experienced smart guys left early in order to miss rush hour in L.A. Tell me about some of the things that happened on the trip. Did you get pulled over? Yeah, we got a ticket in Ohio. Had to go to jail. How long were you in jail? Well, he actually didn’t lock the doors on us. We did have to backtrack 20 miles to Vandalia, Ohio. That cost us at least an hour, if not more. Did you think that had blown your chances? Well, that was pretty dispiriting, that’s for sure. It took us a while to get back up to speed. But after about 30 or 40 minutes, we said, the heck with it. We’re here. Let’s go for it.Photos Courtesy of Mecum Auctions, Inc.It looks like you had to make a repair in Kansas. Well, the 55-mph speed limit was part of it. The whole notion of the Cannonball was a protest against that foolishness. We had a plan for how to refuel the car. The two gas tanks were not connected. So, we’d run the factory gas tank til it was just about run out, and then switch to the other tank and guess how far it’d go. (We actually got pretty decent gas mileage, believe it or not—12 or 13 mpg.)And when we were getting low on gas, and we had to go to the bathroom, we’d find a gas station, and we’d take turns. We had to fill the tanks separately. One guy’d be filling one tank, the other guy would run in to relieve himself. The other guy would come back, and we’d switch. Then wash the windshield. We paid in cash since this was before credit card days, and we didn’t ask for change. We did that in Kansas early in the morning. The car was streaked with dirt, filthy-looking. We came running into the service station, jumped out like a pit stop in NASCAR. There were two cop cars sitting there (there was a breakfast place at the service station). They watched this, and as soon as we pulled out, they pulled out right behind us.They followed us for about 50 miles. Of course, we couldn’t go over 55 miles an hour. Well, that fouled a plug. We finally got to town, and they pulled off, and [the car was] only running on five cylinders. My co-driver said, “We have to change the plug.” There was a Western Auto, or some auto supply store, and he says, “I’ll run in and get the plug and gap it. And you take out the one that’s fouled.”I said, “Rick, how do you know which one is fouled?””Oh,” he says, “it’s the center one on the top bank.”How he knew that, I have no idea.In a Dino, that’s the furthest away, hardest to get to of all the plugs. But we screwed in the new plug, cranked it up, and it ran perfectly the rest of the time. That was the limit of our mechanical misfortune.Photos Courtesy of Mecum Auctions, Inc.Where did you make your best time? On the two-lane roads. In the Midwest, you’d go from one grain tower to another about 50 miles apart. And you could just run it at 120, 125—wasn’t anybody there. When you got to LA and you realized that you won, how did you feel? God, ecstatic. Hoopin’ and hollerin’.At one time, we were in a position to win it by about two hours. But we only won it by a small amount because of lots of other things, not the least of which was getting lost in Los Angeles during rush hour. Some of that was from misdirections—we won’t go into detail about that.
Did you have to drive the car back to Florida, or did you ship it home? I drove it back to Florida. I had a 10-year-old son who flew out, and we drove back together. When we got to New Orleans, it was maybe a week after. I found a Time Magazine and a Sports Illustrated. Both had had a little article about me winning the Cannonball. I got one of the copies and put it in a big envelope, and mailed it to the police officer who’d given me the ticket in Vandalia, Ohio. Without any comment.Because we had never discussed what I was doing, why I was going so fast. I imagine they had a few cups of coffee over that in Ohio. Photos Courtesy of Mecum Auctions, Inc.
Source: caranddriver.com
