Gumball Dreams In A Bugatti
Gumball Dreams In A Bugatti
Season 6, Episode 7 of the ADV Cannonball Podcast
There is a version of this story where I am the one melting into a leather seat somewhere on I-10 outside Gulf Shores, Alabama, watching a temperature gauge creep toward 260 degrees while a helicopter tracks the car from above and thirty thousand strangers wait on Bourbon Street just to catch a glimpse of the machine I'm co piloting. That is not the story I get to tell you. I was on the Isle of Man that week, chasing a different kind of madness at the TT, while my podcast guest Tommy Davies got the phone call that every gearhead who ever rewound a grainy VHS of the Gumball 3000 has been quietly dreaming about since they were old enough to hold a die cast car.
I will say it plainly. I am envious. Deeply, unapologetically envious. But if you know Tommy, or if you have heard either of our conversations, you already understand why I could not be happier that it was him sitting in that seat and not me. Some men get invited to the Gumball 3000 because they own the right car. Tommy got invited because he has spent his entire life being the right kind of person for it, and there is a difference. This week's episode is the story of how a fifteen year old boy who snuck into a hotel car park in London to look at Ferraris ended up, twenty years later, doing the reverse route of his favorite film in a Bugatti Veyron. Crack open a frosty IPA. This one is worth the read before you hit play.
The Kid On The Wrong Side Of The Barrier
To understand why Ed Bolian's phone call meant what it meant, you have to go back to April 2006. A fourteen year old Tommy Davies talked his mum into a day trip to London so he and his mate Ryan could stand on the Pall Mall and watch that year's Gumball grid form up. Being Tommy, standing and watching was never going to be enough. He and Ryan worked out which hotel the cars were staying in, found the fire escape that dropped straight into the underground car park, and spent an afternoon wandering between Ferrari Enzos and a Volkswagen Samba bus running a Porsche 911 engine, sticking gumball decals on cars that belonged to strangers.
Then Bam Margera and Ryan Dunn walked down that same fire escape. Two Jackass obsessed teenage boys got their photo taken, shook Tony Hawk's hand, met a BMX legend, and watched grid veteran Richie Warren roll through in a flame spitting BMW 850 CSi loaded with glamour models. Tommy told me the one person he could not work up the nerve to approach was Alex Roy, quietly programming a first gen TomTom in the corner, a personal hero from the Gumball films who was, unknown to anyone on that grid, about to attempt New York to LA. Tommy got a stolen photo over his shoulder and nothing more. Then the checkered flag dropped, the cars pulled away, and a teenage boy stood at the barrier feeling something he would later recognize as pure FOMO, decades before anyone had a name for it.
The Record That Got Him Arrested
Ed Bolian knew exactly who he was calling. Tommy had already told this story once before, on Ed's own VINwiki channel, where he is known as Britain's most notorious speeder. Long before Gumball, Tommy spent six years quietly obsessing over John O'Groats to Land's End, Britain's own coast to coast run, 841 miles from the top of Scotland to the bottom of Cornwall. In 2017 he allegedly completed it in 9 hours and 36 minutes, an average of 90 miles an hour, past 105 speed cameras, with zero activations.
The story went to the newspapers, then to BBC Radio 2, and then, on his sister's birthday in August 2018, to about fifteen plainclothes officers raiding his family's farm in North Wales at seven in the morning. He was charged with three counts of perverting the course of justice, among other things, offenses that in the UK carry more prison time than some violent crimes. None of it went cleanly. Tommy represented himself through all of it, and it was Tommy, not a barrister, who caught the prosecution sitting on evidence it had a legal duty to disclose, caught one officer testifying under oath that speed cameras were never checked while the officer who actually ran the case said the opposite, and caught a witness statement that had clearly been rewritten to match the newspapers rather than what was actually said. After a week long trial, a jury deliberation that, by Tommy's own reckoning, landed within about four minutes of the O.J. Simpson trial, ended in a not guilty verdict on every count.
I tell you all of this because it matters, and because it is a story big enough that it got its own hour with us back on Season 5, Episode 5 of this podcast, which is worth a listen in its own right if you have not already. When Ed Bolian needed a co driver who understood logistics, who could read a map like a puzzle, who would not blink at 900 mile days or the kind of grey area customs and registration paperwork he genuinely geeks out on for fun, and who loved this insane hobby down to its bones rather than just wanting the photo, there was only one name that made sense. Tommy did not get this invite because he is famous. He got it because he has quite literally bet his freedom on this exact kind of obsession before, and never once treated it like anything less than sacred.
The Call
Ed rang Tommy three or four weeks before the start line and asked what his schedule looked like. Tommy, ever the professional, said he had commitments in Scotland but was otherwise flexible. Ed asked if he wanted to do the Gumball. Tommy, in his own words, said "well, yes, obviously." Even then, Ed told him not to get his hopes up, that things could fall through right up until the moment he landed. Tommy did not fully believe it was real until he was standing in Miami.
Ed Bolian, for anyone who does not already know the name, is not a casual figure in this world. In 2013 he set the modern Cannonball Run coast to coast record at 28 hours and 50 minutes, a mark that stood for six years before it was finally broken. I am currently working my way through For the Record, Ed's own book on that run, and it is every bit as obsessive and meticulous as you would hope. He built VINwiki into a YouTube channel with over two million subscribers built entirely on car people telling car stories. When a man like that calls you personally to fill his passenger seat for a Bugatti Veyron on the Gumball 3000, it is not a small thing, and Tommy knew it.
Packing Light For A Bugatti
Ed told Tommy to pack light. When Tommy asked how light, Ed said the car's front trunk made a Lamborghini Aventador's frunk look generous. Tommy showed up with a duffel bag that was still too big, and ended up sweet talking a genuine Australian billionaire running the rally in a Lamborghini Countach into stashing his luggage in a support G-Wagon for the entire week.
Tommy, in Miami, still not entirely convinced this was actually happening.
The car itself, a Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport from that original mid 2000s generation, is a machine defined by heat. Ten radiators by the official spec sheet, though Tommy swears it felt more like ten heat lamps in the cab of the car, quad turbos, and a genuine dislike of sitting still. In the parade queues out of Fort Lauderdale, in eighty seven percent Florida humidity, the temperature gauge crept toward the point where the transmission would throw a fault and stall the car entirely. Tommy described the acceleration as feeling like a jet taking off with its wings mounted upside down, the turbos pulling your ears back the moment the road opens up. At the lunch stop in Orlando, on the very first day, Ed tossed him the keys. Tommy had done plenty of driving in the States before, but always in his own right hand drive cars, this was his first time behind a left hand drive wheel, and he had to pull straight out of a car park packed with spotters onto a chaotic American intersection in a car worth several million dollars. He made it look easy. That is Tommy in a sentence.
One of only two hypercars on this year's grid, and hot enough to fry an egg on.
Miami, Alligators, And A Red Carpet
The 2026 Gumball 3000 ran Miami to Mexico City, timed to finish at the opening of the World Cup, with the American leg tracing roughly seventy percent of the reverse route of the 2003 Gumball movie, the exact film that first hooked both Tommy and Ed as teenagers. The grid gathered at the Hard Rock Hotel in Hollywood, Florida, where registration day involved a mini electric Porsche doing donuts through the lobby, a casino night, and, in true Florida fashion, an eleven foot alligator that organizer Max Cooper eventually sat on for the cameras. Lennox Lewis waved the checkered flag at the start line. Deadmau5, Afrojack, Bun B, Michelle Rodriguez, and a small army of car spotting fans packed the lot.
Tommy and Ed, red carpet, Hard Rock Hotel, hours before the heat really set in.
Classic Tommy. Ask him about this one, he will go a little red.
"Just a couple of weeks ago, I was literally living how a billionaire lives. And I know that because I was with a few billionaires." Tommy Davies, on the ADV Cannonball Podcast
The Bourbon Street Sea
From Miami the grid moved to Amelia Island, then on to New Orleans, and it was New Orleans that neither Tommy nor Ed could quite find the words for. Gumball had shut down the entire length of Bourbon Street. Estimates put the crowd at thirty thousand people deep along the barriers, National Guard walking the lines with faces that did not crack a smile, Cajun food and cold drinks pouring out of two Gumball run bars, and the whole street throwing beads over the railings in a tradition Tommy had genuinely never experienced before. Ed called it one of the most surreal automotive experiences of his life, and this is a man who has spent the better part of a decade at star studded rallies and automotive events all over the world, on top of holding the actual Cannonball Run record himself. That tells you something about the scale of it.
Bourbon Street, closed for Gumball, thirty thousand people deep.
The Cowboy Capital, And A Six Wheeled Ghost From 2003
The route pushed on to Austin, where the grid rolled down Congress Avenue with the Texas State Capitol behind them, and then to Bandera, the self proclaimed cowboy capital of the world, the last stop before the Veyron's insurance ran out at the Mexican border and Tommy and Ed peeled off while the rest of the grid pushed south under armed escort toward Monterrey, San Miguel, and Mexico City.
The rally's namesake, waiting in Texas.
Somewhere in Austin, rolling in directly behind the Bugatti, was a six wheeled Ferrari Testarossa build driven by Richard Rawlings of Fast N' Loud, a man with his own complicated, decades old rivalry with Alex Roy over the very cross country record Ed himself once held. Tommy, never one to let a moment pass, met Rawlings at the hotel check-in in Austin and mentioned, casually, that his own cross country run, 30 hours and 22 minutes, in his Audi S5, still stands as the fastest time by a non-US driver and the record for a right hand drive car, technically beat the 31:59 Rawlings claims and has tattooed on himself, despite never officially holding the record. The two ended up having breakfast together the next morning. Tommy also crossed paths with Tory Belleci from Mythbusters, and got asked by a stranger to help identify an NFL player sitting nearby, who turned out to be Jimmy Graham. Gumball has a way of doing that to you, putting a Welsh farmer's son, a billionaire, an NFL tight end, and a MythBuster at the same table like it is the most natural thing in the world.
Full Circle
What stuck with me most listening back to this conversation was not the top speed, or the six wheeled Ferrari, or the alligator. It was Tommy telling me that when the grid finally split off toward the Mexican border and Bandera went quiet behind them, he felt fourteen again, standing at that barrier in London in 2006, listening to the engines fade into the distance. Except this time, instead of being left behind on the wrong side of the fence, he got to climb into the Bugatti as a bona fide co-driver and navigator and go along for the ride.
I have known Tommy long enough now to know that this was never really about the car. Ed could have called a hundred other people with the means to say yes to a hypercar seat on the Gumball 3000. He called the one person he knew would actually understand what it meant, because Tommy has spent his whole life proving, sometimes in front of a jury, that he loves this world for exactly the right reasons.
A personal note, since I clearly cannot help myself. I have spent years building and running the ADV Cannonball Rally, and the honest confession buried in all of this is that the job rarely leaves room to just show up and be a participant. I am the one at the start line with a clipboard, not a co-driver seat. So when I hear about something like Gumball, a rally I did not have to organize, permit, insure, or troubleshoot at two in the morning, I will admit it stirs something up. I am not particular about the terms. Any capacity, any machine. Passenger seat, chase van, tuk tuk, does not matter. Just once, I would love to be the one along for the ride instead of the one making sure everyone else gets to enjoy theirs.
That is the trade I made the day I picked up a microphone instead of a set of keys. As a podcaster, and as the author of Chasing Legends, my job has never been to live these stories. It is to sit across from men like Tommy and Ed, lean in, and pull out the details they almost forget to mention: the heat pooling in a cabin built to hold egos, not gasoline; the particular hush before thirty thousand strangers start screaming a name that is not yours; the exact shade of panic in a temperature gauge creeping past 260 degrees with nowhere to pull over. I collect all of it. I get to keep none of it. There is a specific kind of ache in that, listening to a guest describe the best week of his life, all of it built from these same Gumball dreams I grew up on too, with an ocean between me and the story, hearing every engine note secondhand and never once feeling one under me.
Most weeks, I would not trade what I do for what they get to do. This was not most weeks. So yes, I am jealous, plainly and without much shame about it. I would have given up more than I should probably admit to be strapped into that seat on Bourbon Street. But envy has a short memory once you actually sit with who earned the call. Twenty years ago, Tommy was a boy standing at a barrier in London, watching a line of cars disappear down the road without him. This time, the road came back for him. I cannot name a single person on this earth more deserving of that. He earned every mile of it, the long way, and it could not have happened to a better bloke.
Hear The Full Story
Tommy Davies joins Aaron Pufal to break down the entire Gumball 3000 experience, from the call with Ed Bolian to the heat inside a Bugatti Veyron to the scene on Bourbon Street. New episode, out now.
