Other than the relentless pace of One Lap, the event runs pretty smoothly. Tracks are more or less predictable, and as long as no one flouts posted speed limits too badly or too often, getting thrown in jail for reckless driving isn’t really a risk.
That wasn’t always the case. Brock Junior said that One Lap’s association with the Cannonball Run did not escape the notice of law enforcement agencies, and he recalled one of the first years, when the Ohio state police dispatched a helicopter to track down any One Lap-stickered car driving in excess of the speed limit. Something similar happened in 1990, when One Lappers encountered a police welcoming committee in Salt Lake City.
“You would have thought we were the anti-Christ with the number of cops they had there,” he said. “It’s all different now. I even send out notifications to let them know we’re coming, and no one really has problems.”
What makes the current iteration of One Lap challenging are the unpredictable factors. Among other things, weather can turn black and mechanical things can break. For example, somewhere between Denver and Pueblo, rain – which doesn’t fall too often in Colorado – began coming down by the bucketful this year. A tornado was reported in Oklahoma a few days later, and some One Lappers reported seeing 12-inch-deep standing water and chunks of trailer park on the roadway in its wake.

The little Porsche, a very capable machine by all rights, had its problems, too. Somewhere in Texas, we smelled something burning, then heard a very loud pop. I thought for sure the engine had failed, but when we looked behind us, the rear windshield was all spidered with cracks. It had exploded. Some electrical problem with the rear defogger, perhaps? Who knows. (Luckily, even the hardest showers don’t come in when you’re driving faster than about 30 miles per hour, and loading and unloading the car at the track was a breeze until we installed some plexiglass procured from a Home Depot.) Later, the passenger-side window fell off its track – during a rainstorm, naturally. And later still, when a week’s worth of track driving had worn year-old performance tires down to what were effectively slicks, it was impossible to drive faster than about 45 mph during the frequent and sudden downpours that plagued us almost all the way back to New York.
I’d never driven an air-cooled 911 before, and while I’ve never been a huge fan of their styling (I think they look kind of like cartoon frogs), spending time behind the wheel of one gave me the opportunity to “get it” (although I still didn’t know what to say to the little gaggles of drooling Porsche pilgrims who seemed to gravitate toward the car at every fuel stop). To be fair, the Porsche faithful were often part of small throngs of people who came to see why they kept seeing groups of sticker-festooned sports cars (and the Griswold family truckster) on the highway. An Ultima GTR – a Le Mans-worthy supercar – towing a small trailer through rush hour traffic in Tulsa is an uncommon sight for most people.