Alex, after being told he couldn't drive a manual and receiving a lecture on the nature of being a team player by veteran racer and Skip Barber instructor Rene Villeneuve, is now embarking on his next challenge — a dream pursued by only those with big wads of bills or bankrolled by those with even bigger ones.

Now, with Villeneuve as his captain, he embarks on his next endurance challenge — the Grand Am Rolex Sports Car Series.

The series culminates in the 24 Hours of Daytona, and we're quite interested in seeing Alex's mental state after completing that race and eagerly look forward to his first competitive outing on May 17. Roy, the author of The Driver, which tells the tale of driving at illegal speeds coast to coast in pursuit of the transcontinental record, Alex is known more for his brazen flouting of traffic laws and larger-than-life personality than his demure and steely nature as a team manager. Still, he tells us he's learning the meaning of teamwork — so we'll have to wait and see how he performs managing a team he's driving with. [Team Polizei]

Coming out of Albania after the notorious Commander Kokolari escort incident, Michael Ross put the hammer to the floor of the Polizei M5 and took us down toward the Adriatic, which may well have been the most breathtaking bit of a trip full of face-melting, soul-widdling vistas. Coming into the city of Budva, a 2,500 year-old-burg on the coast, Mister Ross was laying on the throttle while Herr Roy alternated through horn, emergency lights, siren and navigation duties. Then the cops showed up.

The officer was nonplussed and wasn't particularly well-versed in English. But what he did know is that an Yank and a Brit dressed as Italian highway patrolmen driving a seven-year-old German performance sedan with a large dent in the roof and Adidas stripes on the side simply didn't add up. Ross calmly informed the officer that we weren't cops and weren't claiming to be officers of the law; that we were raising money for a charity benefiting the London Metropolitan Police (which was actually true, if a bit of a stretch). Unswayed by Ross' calm demeanor, he ordered Roy into his B.O.-stanky VW Golf, put his fellow officer in our shotgun seat and told Ross to follow him to the station.

On the way, in the thick of Budva traffic, we ran across a few other Gumballers. The officer attempted to interdict them, but two cars simply ignored his order, while the Russian couple in the M6 who'd picked up Morley and McConville the day before in Macedonia followed his directions and came to the station with us. Note that at the time, we had no idea that these two had anything to do with the Macedonian situation, so scattered and rumor-laden was the communication.

Once we arrived, they took our passports and forced us to stand around in the cop shop's foyer for around an hour and a half. They used police report forms for toilet-seat covers. The Montenegrin men seemed disturbed by the Polizei crew's leggings. I was mostly thankful that their jackets were long. The Russians grew impatient and finally asked why they were being held when they hadn't been charged with anything and obviously weren't driving a fake BMW police car, which is what had been reported.

Then Alex hit upon the strategy of proving that plenty of cars on the rally were fake police cars. He showed the officers Ross' Bentley from the '06 Gumball, the Polizia Stradale Intercettore in RCMP and Guardia Civil livery, the Polizei CL he'd contested on the Bullrun and in a masterstroke, the M5 shot a few days before at the Hahn airport with a couple of genuine German Polizei Mercs. Ross stifled a "They were very authentic," which was a good thing, given that I was curling my toes trying to stifle guffaws.

Apparently, Ross and I played it off okay, because with that, the chief, who came across like practically every gruff elder statesman of a podunk station ever portrayed told us to lay off the lights and let us go. We hit Croatia soon after. It was time to turn on the radar detector. It was also the next-to-last fun moment we had on the rally. What had begun with the Polizei roadblock in Hahn was all about to come undone in the next twelve hours. – Davey G. Johnson

Related:
">Travels With Commander Kokolari; More on the Gumball 3000 [Internal]

The ever-lovin' Herr Roy knows a thing or two about transcontinental control of incontinence in the service of swaths of ground covered in short amounts of time. He's harbored a friendly rivalry with both Richard Rawlings and the Collins Brothers since his first Gumball back in '03. And as a classic business-giver, Alex has laid down his call for third-party verification of the record (which, according to our conversation with Bullrun organizer Andy Duncan earlier today, there is ample evidence of). While refutations have been flying all morning, there are rumors of Rawlings appearing on Jay Leno tonight (which we heard from Bullrunners, but haven't been able to corroborate with our Tonight Show contact), and Andy insists that they "Definitely, definitely, definitely" went. If it all checks out, even given the distance between Darien, CT and Manhattan it sounds like they well-and-truly broke the Cannonball record from '79. Meanwhile, we're waiting for the exact mileage and a route map to see if there's any possible way that they outdrove the Diem/Turner US Express time from '83. – Davey G. Johnson

Related:
Did Rawlings and Collins Break the Transcontinental Record?; Texas Duo Claims to Have Broken 1979 Cannonball NYC to LA Run [Internal]

After a grueling drive from Athens with the Gumball crew, I grabbed three hours of sleep on top of a bathrobe laid down on a hardwood floor in Team Polizei's room at the Tirana Sheraton. The next morning, we were up and at 'em in the face of a cool rain-threatening Albanian morning. Max Cooper informed us that the people of Albania had rebuilt a bridge in anticipation of Gumball's passage and we'd receive a police escort to the border. We headed outside and Herr Roy immediately got to work moving the Polizia Stradale Intercettore into position. What happened next was both pure comedy and slightly frightening.

A couple of guys in a 911 began goading Alex. At first, he played them off, pulling his arrogant, Alpha Cop schtick on them, calling them unprepared. When they persisted, he went to see Albanian police honcho Commander Kokolari. Commander Kokolari indicated through his translator that he would appreciate a gift, so Alex handed over his safety-orange light-up traffic baton. In exchange, Commander Kokolari had his people ensure that the Team Polizei M5 was the first to leave the line, following the commander himself in a 1.6L VW Bora (That's Mk IV Jetta to you, Yanqui). What's more when Carl and his compatriot in the Porsche attempted to pass us, Commander Kokolari would order his motorcycle cops to box the other cars in so we could pass and regain the lead.

Then it started to rain, and the sight just got surreal. Albanian guys on what seemed like twenty-year-old Moto Guzzis frantically waving oncoming cars onto the shoulder; the route out of Tirana to the border lined with people cheering for the convoy of cars; Alex on the PA yelling out random phrases in semi-Italian-accented English, including my favorite as we passed a somewhat forlorn looking teenager with a hard edge to his face: "Thank you Moped Champion of Albania!" Meanwhile Kokolari — a short, severe, salt-and-pepper man of about fifty with a fireplug build — was leaning out the window waving Alex's baton for all he was worth, grinning at us like a madman. The vision led Roy to comment, "I wonder what'll happen when he figures out that it lights up."

While Ross navigated the wet roads and avoided collision with the hoontastic kamikaze motorcycle cops, Alex took one of the pull-back-and-let-go Mitsubishi Polizei toys he'd purchased at Hahn airport as gifts for the Gumballers and personalized it for Kokolari with a Sharpie. As we reached the border and passed Kokolari, Ross handed it out the window to the obviously chuffed law enforcement officer. It was a surreal start to a day that only got more disjointed. – Davey G. Johnson

Related:
The Inverse of Alexander: Istanbul to Athens [Internal]

A Phyrgian king had bound a chariot yoke/And Alexander cut the Gordian Knot/And legend said that who untied that knot/He would become the Master of Asia – Iron Maiden

The Taxi boys had rented a Mercedes in London for the trip to Hahn, hopped the flight to Istanbul and then set out in a refurbished example of one of the many minibuses that dot the landscape of Western Turkey. The thing was a hoot, and what it lacked in speed, it made up for in range and comfort. But as the day grew later and Kemal still hadn't shown up, we decided to accept Jarod DeAnda and Fly's offer of a ride-along in two of the Volkswagen Sharan support vans.

Donated for the rally by sponsor Addison Lee, who planned to press the minivans into service as what we in the US would know as livery cars once Gumball was done with them, the Sharans arrived brand new. The van we picked up in Istanbul only had 2,000 miles on it. Roy, Ross, DeAnda and Fly piled into one van, while I hopped in with Gumball staffers Dan and Johnny. Since Alex had a route plotted, we let the Fly-piloted van take the lead, and let's just say the old boy set quite a pace. Once we got out of Constantinople-town, it was a 100-120mph dash across some of the bumpiest main roads I've ever encountered. At one point, the rear of the Sharan got so bumpy and light I was hoping that we weren't going to re-enact a diesel-powered version of Torquenstein's 2004 wreck in North Africa. Luckily, that didn't come to pass.

We missed the turn into the Turkish border crossing with the boys in the other van staring in disbelief as Dan braked hard through a red octagonal sign reading "DUR." We realized later that there were men with machine guns just down that particular road, and they must've wondered what in hell the crazy yahoos in a Fußballmutterwagen were up to. We spent 45 minutes at the checkpoint being sent around in circles before we realized that the problem was that the vans had been driven into the country by different people. Digging around, the Gumball crew came up with a list of approved drivers.

Hitting the road again, Alex realized that we were gaining on the Aytac boys in their Ferrari 456GT, the only other team besides Turkish Taxi and our Sharan convoy to make the drive to Athens. And in true Alex fashion, he devised a plan. At a gas stop, we all piled in to the mini mart to stock up on snacks. I fatefully discovered the coveted DAF banner. While ambling back to the van, treats in tow, Roy suddenly came flying out of the store with an armful of masking tape and commanded, "Johnson! I need your help!" Thus ensued a mass stickering of the Fly-piloted Sharan with makeshift Team Polizei livery. The plan was to catch up to Aytac, shadow them until they made a gas stop and then hammer forward to victory, arriving triumphant in Athens. It didn't quite work. The rain came down in falls as soon as we left the station, washing the Polizei VW of its haphazard markings. Aytac (both great guys, by the way), after swapping a Subaru alternator into their Fezza, put the distance on us.

Meanwhile, Johnny became enamored of the Dream Sandwich, a pseudo-sub that seemed to consist largely of bread. We made a final fuel stop about an hour or so out of Athena's fair city, where we fueled up on Greek pastries; once into town we paid a taxi driver to lead us to the Hilton. Cruising through a flashing yellow light (apparently, a said signal means something different in Greece than it does in the UK or US), we were nearly T-boned by a Skoda cab with no intention of stopping. We pulled in with a few miniscule bits of tape stuck to the Polizei Sharan while the DAF banner hung proudly in the rear of our vehicle. We bailed on the Hilton and headed for the airport Sofitel, so's to be closer to the cars in anticipation of their release the next morning.

With all of the smack that's been talked about the rich fucks in their expensive cars since the Macedonian accident, people tend to forget that part of the joy of these rallies is the sheer ingenuity they engender, not to mention the fun involved that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with speed. What's not wonderful about tooling through the mountains of Greece singing along with Dean Martin? Or scoring official patches from Turkish border patrol agents? Or stop signs that read "DUR?" I think anyone in those two vans would agree it was the most enjoyable day of Gumball; even if we weren't in the M5 — maybe because we weren't in the M5 — it encapsulated the anything-can-happen nature of a transcontinental rally. While some guys may sign up to drive fast and bone hookers at every stop, the thing I've appreciated most about rallying is the sense of instant camaraderie that develops; the shared wonder at seeing things we never thought we'd encounter. The Istanbul-Athens run? It was an absolute shining example of that. – Davey G. Johnson

More on the Gumball 3000 [Internal]

Our pals at Team Polizei have pledged $10,000 toward the creation of a fund to benefit the family of Vladimir and Margarita Cepuljoski, the couple who died after an accident involving Gumballers Nick Morley and Matthew McConville last week in Macedonia. Other ralliers have expressed interest in helping the Cepuljoskis' relatives after the tragedy, so the Polizei stepped up and are organizing just such an effort. Interested in helping out? click here to donate. – Davey G. Johnson

Cepuljoski Family Memorial Fund Launch [Team Polizei]

Related:
Fast as a Shark: East of Eden: The Fall of the Gumball 3000 [Internal]

Ever make the perfect purchase? It doesn't matter whether it costs ten million dollars or six euros, it's something you simply must own, and if it's remotely within your wherewithal to do so, you are helpless to resist. Such was the case with this suction-cupped DAF banner meant for the windshield of a long-haul truck. We employed it in various fashions from the point we picked it up at a Hellenic truck stop. In fact, we slept with it last night. We expect the Loverman to shoot us in a fit of jealous rage in the time it takes between the moment this post goes up and the far end of the E.T. between the endpoints of the 110 freeway. Sorry, Loverman, you lengthy lothario you. We await our demise. Bis später! (Note, one of these photos might be NSFW.) – Davey G. Johnson

Related:
More DAF! [Internal]

Alex Roy, Gumball organizer Julie Brangstrup and Michael Ross just before the cars are released at at the airport in Athens.

And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for that is one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If that glory can be killed, we are lost.

There should have been something in place. Morocco, 2004, on the running of the fifth Gumball 3000 should have been a warning. A Ferrari 360 ate it in spectacular fashion. The Reyland Escort Cosworth nearly took out Team Polizei. Jerry "Torquenstein" Reynolds survived what looked to be a death blow of an accident when the ass end of his Viper got loose on a North African road. But Gumball organizers Maximillion Cooper and Julie Brangstrup got off easy. Single-car pileups, as it were; no fatalities, and only Reynolds' bandaged head at the finish line to illustrate that anything had gone wrong.

So when an elderly couple pulled out in front of Nick Morley's Porsche in an old Golf, the ultimate result wasn't a surprise to anyone. I talked to Dan Neil not long before I left and he cautioned me, "Be careful. One of these days, somebody is going to get killed on one of these rallies." The worst case scenario, of course, was that said somebody would happen to be a civilian.

Yes, the Gumball is a rally, not a race, but let's step back a moment. It took me twenty-two hours to get from Tirana, Albania to Bratislava, Slovakia. Around an hour and a half was spent in a police station in Montenegro with Team Polizei and a few completely confused real police officers. Another couple of hours passed in Croatia waiting to hitch a ride in a VW Sharan support van after the Dubrovnik checkpoint. If you've laid out around 40k in entry fees, had your car shipped from points unknown to London, been shut down around 50 miles from a checkpoint on the first day of the rally, been held in a Turkish airport bar while your car is diverted to Athens, you're going to be anxious to hit the fucking road.

Part of the problem was with the ALK CoPilot nav system handed out by the organizers. Instead of being held responsible for setting their own routes via their own GPS units or by good old-fashioned paper maps, the CoPilot — a system designed to work with mobile phones — was obscenely unreliable and required a great deal of attention to work with any semblance of accuracy. Nevertheless, Cooper defended the CoPilot's accuracy at the driver's meeting in Albania. Later that day, the CoPilot directed Team Polizei and numerous other drivers to a blocked-off tunnel. Who should come up the road but Maximillion himself? Roy leaned out the passenger side window and commented, "So there's no problem with the CoPilots, Max?" Admittedly, in short order, the under-construction tunnel was unblocked for our convoy, but problems with the units were legion during the rally, and time lost (a Kuwaiti team in a Murcielago en route to Albania ended up routed to within 300 km of Turkey before they realized that everything was wrong and sped back) led to fatigue and fast driving in situations where it may not have been prudent.

Interestingly, I don't believe that Nick Morley was engaging in wanton speed-freakery in Macedonia. I was in the support van called to the scene; according to the CoPilot people, we were the closest support van to the accident. Reports were mixed. Serious inuries. Wait. Gumballers walked away. Oh wait, a death. Rumors started flying. We debated de-stickering the Sharan and hiding Gumball-related articles of clothing. We worried that we'd get into Macedonia and not be able to get out. We sent the van behind us forward as bait, telling them to wait for us at the border while we ate at a rural gas station. We hoped they'd be unable to resist testing the border in their urge to spank us in the unofficial Crewball 3000. Somehow, the knowledge that we weren't going to be left to fester in a Macedonian prison outweighed losing a stage to the other Sharan. I immediately developed a stress-related cold that I've yet to shake.

We passed the accident site somewhere in the night, having missed it as the result of some wrong turn, we suppose. Kemal Sadikoglu of the Turkish Taxi team pulled into the Albanian border checkpoint a half-hour after we did and claimed that they'd held Nick Morley's brother Oliver up once the authorities called out that shit had changed when word came down that Vladimir Cepulyoski had died of a heart attack after Morley and Matthew McConville's TechArt Porsche had T-boned their Volkswagen. Although the information I've been able to glean is muddy, the #19 M6 piloted by a Russian couple pulled up and Morley and McConville hopped in, only to be yanked out at a border checkpoint, while the Russians were allowed to continue.

The next day, Roy, Ross and I were detained for an hour and a half by Montenegrin cops due to the use of the Polizei M5's use of lights and sirens in traffic. They pulled the Russians in simply because they were in a stickered BMW that happened to be stuck in traffic while they were taking us to the police station. I can't tell whether the Russians were dumb or just stereotypically Russian, but I'm guessing that you don't get to own an M6 in Russia by being dumb, although playing ignorant and foreign is an advantage in plenty of Gumball situations. It got us the hell out of Montenegro, after all. I honestly can't say one way or another that the Russians knew what they were involved in. Their English was too bad; yet I don't know if it was on-purpose bad.

What I do know is this. The Macedonian roads on the proscribed route would be hell on cars like that TechArt Porsche. Our diesel Sharan was as fast as just about anything on those byways. And if, as the CoPilot people suggested, we were on the route that ultimately claimed the lives of the Cepulyoskis, I'm willing to believe Cooper's claim that Morley was in the neighborhood of the speed limit. The aforementioned Kuwaiti Murcie had been purchased brand-new for the rally; its crew had been directed up and down a dirt road for over an hour before we showed up. The car was fucked-up, dirty and making unfortunate noises. Macedonia is no place for a purebred supercar, and a TechArt Neun-Elf is essentially that. And beyond that, a Mk II Golf is no match for a modern Porsche in terms of safety systems. It's not particularly surprising that an elderly couple in such a machine would succumb to their injuries, however sad and tragic the circumstances may be. Nevertheless, the oncoming vehicle they pulled out in front of could just have as easily been a truck, and the world media never would have heard about it.

Yet it was a sticker-covered sports car driven by two wealthy Britons. It's news. Because those two Britons were scared shitless of a Macedonian jail, even if it was the elderly couple who pulled out of them when the Porsche had the right-of-way, it's not hard to understand why Morley and McConville ended up running. In such an accident in the United States or the UK, one generally knows what to expect. People have posited that the guys deserve to die in prison for running. On the other hand, I'd ask our readers, if they thought they had a chance to get out when everything turned to shit and they faced rotting in a second-world jail, if they might not attempt to get away as well. I'm not calling their runner the right decision, but I'm not damning them for it either, given that from what I've been able to piece together, it apparently wasn't their first instinct.

We got into Tirana at 4am. I walked into the hotel and found Herr Roy at the hotel bar. It had been a brutal day for everyone. I slept on a hardwood floor with a bathrobe for a mattress and woke up three hours later. Max proclaimed at the drivers' meeting that there a ton of rumors flying around Gumball and urged us not to talk to the press; to let the Gumball PR machine handle things.

Not long afterward, at 7am EDT on Thursday, May 3rd, Team Polizei's support guru J.F. Musial called the Macedonian embassy in London and confirmed that Cepulyoski was dead. That's noon in London. 1 or 2pm in Eastern Europe. If some 21-year-old college student in Hoboken, New Jersey could verify that the accident had resulted in a fatality via government channels, one would think that the rally organizer would certainly know well beforehand. Yet the morning briefing in Tirana was essentially a plea to keep a "first rule of Gumball, don't talk about Gumball" code of omerta in place with not even a slight whiff of death's maddening stank.

Just past Dubrovnik, Team Polizei tendered their resignation from the rally. On the road to Split, in a Sharan with a number of green Gumball volunteers in their early twenties headed by Kitty Cooper, Max's younger sister (who, by the way is a total sweetheart) we ran into a number of Gumballers on the side of a suburban road. We chucked the people-carrier halfway up a driveway and hoofed it back to the huddled crew. Cooper's flat-black vinyl-wrapped XJ220 sat two driveways behind us. For the first time I'd seen, Max wasn't wearing his sunglasses. He seemed a small, tired confused man. He laid out to the crew what I'd set down an hour earlier from my experience in the support van the day before. He asked me to remove the posts from "that website." Kitty played dumb. But she knew. She'd known.

Of course she'd known, as one of Maximillion's own. The other crew boys, who'd signed up as volunteers as a way to collect foreign poontang and see exotic cars were shocked and pissed that they hadn't been informed. They were crew, in their minds. The drivers were trying to piece together what'd gone down from reports from those who'd happened on the scene, the news media reports and word from drivers close to the Morleys. Kemal recalled Oliver's face going sheet-white when the authorities said that Vladimir was dead and that Nick and Matthew needed to stick around. Bear in mind that Oliver Morley is an irrepressible individual who generally arouses the ire of anyone he decides he doesn't like.

At the morning-after press conference in Tirana, Max announced that we were indeed going to Germany; that there would be a police escort to Berlin and to get back to the UK, every team would be provided with safe-passage papers for every German state on the route. For most drivers, that fell apart somewhere in Croatia. The word had gotten to the mainstream media. Although the polizei roadblock outside Hahn was apparently the work of one overzealous policeman, it was obvious at that point that the whole mess would be spun in his favor, despite the last few days of work the Gumball staff had put into getting everything re-sorted. Sadly, though, more effort had gone into that than informing the drivers and crews of the accident, its aftermath and Morley and McConville's attempt to escape Macedonia.

A tad more Steinbeck: "Christ, I wish they hadn't killed off all the grizzly bears. In eighteen-eighty, my grandfather killed one up near Pleyto weighed eighteen-hundred pounds." But what if? What if the grizzlies set themselves up to be killed by doing the only thing they knew how to do? And if Gumball 3000 is the eighteen-hundred-pound grizzly of open-road rallies, it stands to reason that Max and Julie — only knowing how to be Max and Julie because they'd gotten by on being Max and Julie for years — didn't blink in the face of the small man with the rifle, because how could he possibly hurt them? How did it all come undone? Simple. They'd nearly bled out before they realized that the wound was serious. Thanks for listening. We'll see you again Wednesday. – Davey G. Johnson

"Fast as a Shark" is a weekly electronic broadside aimed at what has been historically right and terribly wrong with the autmotive industry and culture. And yes, Johnson's iPod is engraved with an Accept reference.

Related:
More Gumball 3000; Fast as a Shark: Living on Chinese Rocks [Internal]

"Team Polizei's Alex Roy & Michael Ross feel compelled to challenge Gumball 3000 over the untenable position in which participants were placed.

At 8am on Thursday, May 3rd, 2007, Maximillion Cooper addressed a driver briefing in the Sheraton Hotel, Tirana, Albania.

Despite the disturbing rumours of the fatality of a Macedonian motorist on Wednesday, May 2nd, Mr. Cooper stated that "Gumball is often the subject of wild rumours," after which the rally was allowed to proceed.

We question whether participants were given all facts available at that time, enabling them to exercise personal judgment in deciding whether to withdraw from the event immediately.

Alexander Roy
Captain
Team Polizei 144

Related:
Gumball 3000 Organizer Max Cooper Blames Dead Elderly Couple For Hit-And-Run Accident; "Scumball 3000" Is Not The Scummy Gumball 3000 — Enter The "Dumball 3000"; Scumball 3000 Shows Us What The Scene Of A Heart Attack Looks Like; Gumball 3000 Race Organizers Attempting To Cover Up Hit-And-Run; Gumballers Nick Morley And Matthew McConville Arrested After Hit-And-Run Fatality [internal]

"In view of events of the past day, Alex Roy and Michael Ross of Team Polizei have withdrawn from the 2007 Gumball Rally. They are driving to Bratislava to thank the fans that have traveled from so far. They will make a further statement at 10.00GMT."

Team Polizei Departs Gumball 07 [Gumball144.com]

Related:
Nick Morley Given "30 Days Temporary Detention" In Gumball 3000 Fatal Hit-And-Run; Russian BMW Reportedly Picked Up Morley And McConville After Deadly Gumball 3000 Hit-And-Run; Gumball 3000 Race Organizers Attempting To Cover Up Hit-And-Run; Gumballers Nick Morley And Matthew McConville Arrested After Hit-And-Run Fatality [internal]

Herr Alex Roy and the mysterious Jeff Musical, only known as a part-time resident of Hoboken, New Jersey and German car enthusiast, spent the early part of today dropping off the Polizei 144 M5 Interceptor off at an undisclosed dock somewhere on the Eastern Seabord. This sadly means we will not be tooling around NYC this week in what may be the most infamous single BMW in the company's history. On the other hand, it means that what's likely the most insane road-rally car ever constructed will soon be on its way to do what it does best. Schadenfreude, thy name is Team Polizei. Plus, FXXs!– Davey G. Johnson

Gumball 2007 [Fotki]; Team Polizei

Related:
Polizei: Team Polizei Not Really Actual Polizei [Internal]

In German law enforcement, there is no room for imprecision. Our pal Alex Roy is one highly precise man. Some would say precise to the point of obsession. Anyway, last night he kicked down an e-mail from German law enforcement (in Comic Sans, no less, which we feel is not precise enough for German police), which we've reprinted after the jump. We thought was rather amusing, and we can imagine Herr Roy giggling his ass off when he received it. As we have no interest in the Bundespolizei knocking at our door in the middle of the night, especially the feared Grenzschutzgruppe Eins Vier Vier, we have redacted the officer's name.

Sorry Guys someone told ya a real Bullshit Story.

I'm serving since 36 years and we never had a team or a force like you said.

The German Government never formed a "Unit 144", cause in all of our 16 different States we only have State Police Departments. The patch you sell, is from the State of Lower Saxony. The Federal Police is in charge with totally different things, at the Airports, Railroad Stations and Borders. They never where in charge with the "Autobahn" so who the fuck told ya this Bullshit about "Unit 144"? The German law says, the only Authority for Police Troops in the States, is in the hands of the State Governments and not with the Federal Government.

So with this story you really cheat on your customers cause the whole thing is fake.

– Davey G. Johnson
Related:
Team Polizei; More Alex Roy [Internal]

Our pal Alex Roy, meisterkopf behind Team Polizei, has had this video posted up on one of his numerous Polizei-related sites for a while now, and among the rallying cognicenti, it's somewhat the stuff of minor legend. But you know, faking pulling guys over in Lambos never really gets old, does it? We're gonna buy a few cans of black and white Krylon, give the Durango a quick-and-dirty, put on our best Vic Mackey face and head over to Emil Rensing's neighborhood now. Enjoy the video.

Team Polizei Gumball 3000 Site

Related:
More on Alex Roy; More hoons [Internal]

Unofficial Results Checkpoint Vienna:

1st: Team Polizei
2nd: Team NSX (Honda NSX)
3rd: Pete (Team Ant&Pete - BMW 3-series D2)

Unofficial Results Checkpoint Budapest:

1st: Team Polizei
2nd: Team NSX (Honda NSX)
3rd: Pete (Team Ant&Pete - BMW 3-series D2)
4th: Team 3ezer

OFFICAL POLIZEI GUMBALL UPDATE - #3

Tuesday, 2 May 2006

04:41:58 (a.m.) (G.M.T.)

The first stage of the 2006 Gumball3000 has, for the most part, come to an end. The event though has suffered a few losses. Once again, a Dodge Viper (SRT-10) has fallen victim to the Gumball. This incident has once more drawn the obvious conclusion: If you plan on doing the Gumball, do not drive any car that is named or once was named, "Viper". The first two days have been a success for Team Polizei as they have arrived first at every checkpoint. Tuesday morning, the rally continues as the drivers will wake for a short drive to Belgrade. There, the drivers and cars will board a plane and head to Thailand. In Thailand, it is rumored that the speed limits have been lifted for the Gumball. This is of concern to Team Polizei and other veterans of the event. In light of the 2004 rally which led Gumballers through northern Africa where the speed limits were lifted as well, Team Polizei has accepted a new strategy for Thailand stage.

The African stage in 2004 had the most accidents out of any other Gumball. This was in part due to Gumballers pushing themselves just a bit too far. Team Polizei's two veteran drivers feel that the same situation may occur in Thailand. In an effort to maintain the Gumball spirit as well as provide immediate help for any accident or emergency, Team Polizei will NOT be pushing for the front at any point in Thailand. The team will remain near the middle of the pack at all times, constantly monitoring the rally status in the hopes to be able to provide any support necessary at any time. This will also provide an opportunity for other teams to concur certain checkpoints without having to worry about the Polizei GT coming up in the rear view mirror. Team Polizei would like to use this update to please ask all teams to drive safely and remain respectful of the host countries.

By: John-Francis Musial

Team Polizei Correspondent, as reported by Team Captain Alex Roy, currently
on the road.

Related:
More Gumball 3000 coverage [internal]