Iconic Auto Editor Brock Yates Dies at 82

Brock Yates, the bigger-than-life automotive editor, raconteur and curmudgeon, died today at age 82 after a 12-year bout with Alzheimer’s disease.

Yates joined Car and Driver in 1964 and remained with the magazine for 42 years. During that time he railed at safety advocates and what he saw as the perils of over-regulation.

In protest of Washington’s imposition of a nationwide 55-mph speed limit to conserve oil, Yates organized the highly illegal Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash in 1971. The objective was to drive from the Red Ball Garage in Manhattan to the Portofino Hotel in Redondo Beach, Calif., as fast as possible. Entrants could use any vehicle and follow any route.

Yates and race car driver Dan Gurney won the first event in a Ferrari Daytona, completing the 2,800-mile trip in less than 36 hours. “At no time,” Yates deadpanned in C and D, “did we exceed 170 mph.”

Yates organized four more Cannonball runs. The events were memorialized in two films: the commercially successful “The Cannonball Run,” and the infinitely better but relatively obscure Gumball Rally. In 1984 he recast the event as the considerably more sedate One Lap of America, in which entrants obey speed limits as they scramble in modified but street-legal vehicles from race track to race track for competitive events.

Yates is survived by his wife, whom he inevitably referred to as Lady Pamela, two sons, a daughter and a stepdaughter.