Wired ran a really well-written article last month about Alex Roy and his quest to beat the 24 year old record of 32 hours 7 minutes for driving cr0ss-country from New York to LA aka the Cannonball run. Most people believed that it couldn’t be done within the current political climate and technological abilities of law-enforcement. One of the more interesting aspects of the article focuses on Roy’s obsessive planning that resulted in phone book sized spreadsheet that detailed minute course specific data.

Roy…has spent months loading Excel documents with the coordinates of all-night gas stations and open stretches of      highway and weather projections — hundreds of data points arranged on an x-y axis, so that any deviation can be   recalculated on the fly.

His data-based approach might have given him and his partner the edge he needed to finish well under the previous record with a time of 31 hours 6 minutes. Check out the statistical breakdown by the numbers and see the route.