While some Bandit Run enthusiasm takes the form of Bandit-worthy burnouts, other participants are content to show off by displaying framed movie posters, movie stills, and even Smokey and the Bandit models. Rick Rodriguez has all three with his '77 Trans Am Special Edition.
"I saw the movie with my mom when I was ten years old, and I swore I'd have the car someday," he says. "If you study the movie, it's hard to find a difference between this car and the one the Bandit drove."
Back on the road, we're headed to Birmingham, Alabama, and Kinney's Trans Am is once again running strong. Although it's behaving well, it is drinking heavily (10 mpg!). The group stops at a gas station in Alabama, and the semis driving past give an air-horn salute. Smokey and the Bandit didn't just lionize the Trans Am, of course; it also made heroes of truckers. Unfortunately, we don't have a tractor trailer full of Coors along with us, but there's plenty waiting at the bar in Birmingham's Redmont Hotel.
The next morning, heading out onto I-20, our numbers have swollen again. At our stop at Talladega Superspeedway, I count sixty-five cars that have muscled in for a group photo. After a tour of the NASCAR museum--where the lone Trans Am, a white, early '80s pace car, is ignominiously displayed dirty and spotted with bird crap--the Run heads to its final destination, Road Atlanta.
"This is something I've always wanted to do--drive an SE from Texarkana to Atlanta," says Tyler Hambrick, who's driving his '77 Special Edition. For those who want to do a little bit more, Hambrick will lead a tour two days later that takes in the Atlanta-area movie shooting locations, which he's researched in the Georgia archives.
What is it about Smokey and the Bandit--which Reynolds himself played down as "a rainy Saturday afternoon kind of movie"--that gave it such a powerful impact for so many people? Perhaps the best answer comes from Regina Johnsey, who drove the full length of the Run with her brother, not in a Trans Am but in his '68 Catalina coupe. "To me, one of the best things about the movie is that it has a wonderfully anarchic sensibility." More so than so many highbrow car-guy events, the Bandit Run captured that same sense of fun. And 10-4 to that.