He's a tall, lanky Southerner with a penchant for cars, and, of all things, lizards. He has a polite face and an eager-to-please demeanor. His teaches Sunday school with his wife. Ed Bolian is the kind of guy you might meet on an airplane and forget before you picked up your bags – with one exception: he just became the fastest man ever to drive across the United States.

That's right: Alex Roy's familiar cross-country driving record, set in his now-famous LeMans Blue 2000 BMW M5 during the fall of 2006, no longer stands. It was allegedly broken by a three-man team consisting of Ed, a co-driver, and a passenger, in a 2004 Mercedes-Benz CL55 AMG.

First, we should address the term "broken". When I think of a record that's been "broken," I imagine beating something by a second, or a minute, or maybe a few RBIs. If what Ed says is true, the record wasn't broken: it was shattered. In 2006, Alex and company completed the transcontinental journey in 31 hours and 4 minutes. Two weeks ago, Ed and his crew say they managed to do the deed in 28 hours and 50 minutes. Google says it takes 40 and a half. //

All of this started in 1933 when a crazy man from Indiana named Edwin "Cannonball" Baker drove from New York to Los Angeles in 53 hours and 30 minutes in some car called the Blue Streak. No one knows Baker's motivation for the run, but his 50 mph average was highly impressive, considering the interstate system was not yet built. The record went unbeaten for 40 years.

In the 1970s, noted auto racer and Car and Driver contributor Brock Yates conceived the "Cannonball Baker Sea-To-Shining Sea Memorial Trophy Dash" – also called the Cannonball Run – to protest highway speed limits. I won't bore you with the details, but the record was slowly whittled down over the next decade until Dave Heinz and Dave Yarborough teamed up in 1979 to make the trek in 32 hours and 51 minutes behind the wheel of a Jaguar XJS.