Team Sets Two-Way Transcontinental Record in a 2008 Saab 9-5 Aero

A team driving a 2008 Saab 9-5 Aero has reclaimed the coast-to-coast-to-coast speed record, crossing the continental US twice in 61 hours and 59 minutes. The unsanctioned 5,620-mile run, first reported on the website saabplanet.com, broke the record of 65 hours and 19 minutes set in 2022 by a three-member team driving a 2012 Mercedes-Benz sedan.

Drivers Nik Krueger, Wes Vigh, and Christopher Michaels completed the westward crossing in 31 hours and 39 minutes, and were even quicker on their return, making the eastward trip in 30 hours and 17 minutes. The team isn’t revealing the dates, saying only that the run took place in October.

The run, Nik’s third in the Saab, was inspired by the Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash races of the 1970s, which were the brainchild of Car and Driver editors Brock Yates and Steve Smith. As in the original, Nik and his teammates began their drive from the Red Ball Garage in Manhattan and ended at the Portofino Hotel & Marina in Redondo Beach, California. Unlike the original competitors, though, they climbed back into the Saab after a three-minute stop and drove back to the Red Ball.

‘An amazing adventure’

“It was an amazing adventure, such a crazy story to even get back to the point where we had a shot at this, and what a run it was!” Nik posted on his Instagram account. “So incredibly grateful to our friends and family who supported our lunacy in all this!”

It’s obvious that much has changed since the early days of the Cannonball, when a team’s preparation might consist of plugging a Valentine One radar detector into the cigarette lighter and filling the back seat with bags of salty snacks. “It’s easy for someone to think you just get in the car, point it west, and hit the gas pedal,” Nik, who does marketing for a Wisconsin manufacturer, tells us. “So much of the planning comes down to how to do this safely and still, obviously, have a shot at the record.

“We planned for a long time for this run, and that means things like looking at traffic patterns and trying to understand when there are fewer people on the road,” he continues. “It’s designing and setting up a car and a team so that you are focused 100 percent on the road, and the other drivers and the task at hand…. We are three people in a car who are focused on nothing but the road and what we’re doing.”

Top speed: 156 mph

The Saab topped out at 156 mph on the run, and could have gone faster if the gasket between the exhaust manifold and the turbo hadn’t melted, causing a leak. “It’s built to go faster,” Nik says. “I’ve gotten the car up to 168, and I know it has some room on top of that. I’m told that it will do in the 170s, and I believe that.”

But maximum velocity isn’t the whole story. “Realistically, there aren’t that many times or places where you’re even going to be able to even get it up that fast,” Nik says. “You have to think about maximizing the open stretches when you have them, and doing your best to work through traffic when you don’t have an open stretch.”

In spite of their preparations, the run was anything but easy. “We just had everything thrown at us,” Nik says. “We had a mechanical issue with some bad gas. We had bad weather that shut down the highway for a little bit, and we had to reroute. Traffic was decent, but we had some bad traffic areas … I think we just did a really good job of planning ahead and sticking to our plan when we encountered issues.”

The various state departments of transportation unwittingly helped with the run, because many of the cameras set up to watch stretches of the interstates are accessible to the public. “Part of what our overhead time was doing was watching those cameras so that they could spot traffic conditions … they were using all that information to help us,” Nik says. Even roadway surface temperature readings were available.

An important piece of the planning process is determining the best timing for navigating the areas around the big cities, where traffic is heaviest. It has to go off like clockwork if the team is going to succeed; exceeding a planned speed between two points might put them into heavy traffic that they might otherwise have avoided.

Preparing the Saab

The Saab already had 160,000 miles on its odometer when Nik bought it in 2020. The sedan has been upgraded with forged internals for its DOHC inline-four, a bigger turbo, an improved cooling system, a better exhaust system, and bigger fuel injectors, as well as improvements to its suspension and the cooling system for its automatic transmission. Self-leveling shock absorbers from the European version of the 9-5 wagon were installed in the rear, to help keep the car level as its 50-gallon fuel supply is depleted.

Nik, who describes himself as a longtime Saab fan, says the things that make the 9-5 a good transcontinental runner include its good handling and relatively good fuel economy — considering the speeds they were maintaining, he says, 15 mpg isn’t so bad. The Saab is safe — “you know, they’re European cars, designed to be driven on the autobahn” — and comfortable. “The most important thing that people tend to overlook is that they’re kind of obscure,” Nik adds. “People don’t know what a Saab is. If you take the badges off and modify the exterior slightly, nobody knows what kind of car that is.” Which makes it harder for other motorists to give an accurate report to law enforcement.

The Saab has crossed the continent five times at maximum speed. In April 2002, Nik, Vigh, and Mark Spence drove it to a two-way record of 65 hours and 28 minutes, knocking eight hours of the previous best time. That record that fell one week later to the team in the Mercedes-Benz. Nik also did a one-way Cannonball in April 2021. In November of that year, Nik participated in an event called the Musket Ball Run, organized to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the original Cannonball.

Safety and the human Factor

Establishing the right team, Nik says, is essential. “When you’re going for something like this, you can’t just pick your friend who always wanted to go,” he says. “You really need to pick somebody who has that proven experience, somebody that you know can drive 5,600 miles in a weekend, and somebody who can do it at the speed you need it to be done, and definitely somebody that you trust to do it safely.

“You need to be comfortable with whoever’s in the driver’s seat going 140, 150 miles an hour while you’re taking a nap in the back. There’s just an insane amount of trust.”

What about driver fatigue? “You can plan for that,” Nik says. “You just want to make sure that everyone is kind of following that plan.”

During their 5,620 miles of driving, the team broke just two laws: they constantly broke the speed limit, obviously, and they ran two red lights when there were no other drivers on the road. For their efforts, they weren’t pulled over once. “If somebody in front of you is not to be trusted, you need to wait for them to get out of the way. Don’t try to do anything dumb. We were not driving on the shoulder to overtake people. We weren’t doing any of that kind of stuff,” Nik says. That responsible behavior separated them from many, many of their fellow drivers.

Nik, like his fellow drivers, has spent a lot of time thinking and talking about the possible legal consequences of chasing the Cannonball record. “From just a purely legal perspective, it’s a risk that you have to calculate — you know, am I willing to pay the fines or go to jail for this, and whether or not that was the right decision? Obviously, we all chose, yes.

“I think the bigger thing that kind of ran through my mind ahead of time is, why are these laws in place, and what are they protecting, and how do I make sure that I’m equally protective — or more — when I’m out doing this?” he continues. “When you think about it, speeding on its own is not inherently dangerous, so long as you’re within the limitations of yourself and your vehicle…. All the other risks are, you know, if somebody jumps out in front of you, or they don’t use their signal, or whatever it is. It’s really heavily reliant on somebody else breaking the law, or being dangerous out there.”

What’s next for the Saab 9-5 Aero team? Well, the most recent run puts them in a tie with another of Nik’s good friends, who’s made five runs in a Toyota Prius. “He’s worked on pushing the limits of what a hybrid can do, and he’s actually done some stuff with autonomous driving. He recently did a couple of crossings autonomously,” Nik says.

Is this a tie that needs to be broken? “We both joke about it,” he says. “Do we break it, or do we just keep going out, like, together?”

Cannonball Run community

There is a community of like-minded people around the Cannonball, and they’re a little less competitive with each other than you might imagine. The target isn’t necessarily to beat the latest record-holder, but to challenge the hard realities of time and distance. “The Cannonball community is such a close group of friends,” Nik says. “The folks who broke our record back in 2022 are very good friends. I have a group chat with them — I talk to them all the time. And a lot of those folks helped us on our run this time — it was all hands on deck.

“If somebody wants to go out and do a record run, if it’s a record run, or if it’s just ‘Hey, I want to go try one,’ we’re all there to help them. It’s easy to say that so-and-so took the record from me, or whatever it is, but I would say we’re all out there racing the road. We’re all out there racing the clock. It’s just a matter of who’s done it best.”

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