Scooter Cannonball Run Pushes Riders and Scooters To The Limit
Wide open spaces are not the usual purview of scooters, but the Scooter Cannonball riders will be ... More faced with long runs on very rural roads.
Note: The author rides a Vespa GTS 300 but is not competing in this year's event. Check back in 2027, however.
Driving from the picturesque coastal town of Seaside, Oregon, to South Padre Island off the coast of Texas is an undertaking no matter how you look at it. Google Maps estimates that the most direct route would take 37 hours of driving time to cover the 2,500 miles, so plan on at least three full days behind the wheel. Covering the same miles on a motorcycle would be more arduous as you're out in the elements, but on a bike like the top-spec $32,000 Indian Roadmaster PowerPlus Limited that I currently have in for review, certainly not too much of a hardship. But Sunday morning, several hundred brave riders will set out to complete the same journey on... motor scooters. Yes, scooters.
Welcome to the 2025 Scooter Cannonball.
Scooters—think Vespas and such—are designed to be efficient and affordable urban transportation, and they remain effective (and often stylish) tools for navigating crowded cities. Popular in Europe for decades and widely used as primary transportation in many Asian countries, scooters continue to be a somewhat fringe segment in the car-and-truck (and motorcycle) obsessed United States, where they are seen more as urban fun machines rather than dedicated modes of transport. However, this is beginning to change slowly in some American cities as their popularity grows, partly due to their economical operating costs, ease of parking and ability to cut through traffic.
Gather a group of wheeled vehicles, and of course, there will be some racing involved. Every other year since 2004, brave riders have been journeying coast to coast (or border to border) in the Scooter Cannonball, a time/speed/distance competition that pits riders and machines against each other, nature, the clock, and a grueling route much longer than what Google Maps suggests, as it follows back roads, county byways, and even dirt paths. The riders have one week to complete the journey, although many won't succeed.
The 2025 Scooter Cannonball route follows back roads and rural highways from Oregon to the Texas ... More coast. This map shows the most direct route if driven by car.
Inspired by the original 'Cannonball Run' dreamed up by auto journalist Brock Yates in the 1970s, that experiment resulted in a still-entertaining 1981 movie led by Burt Reynolds. Yates named the race in honor of Erwin 'Cannonball' Baker, who repeated the coast-to-coast journey over 100 times by car and motorcycle beginning in the early 1900s, long before highways - or even paved roads - were common.
Today, the Scooter Cannonball is made possible by the continued technical refinement of today's more modern machines (and much improved roads), but these small motorbikes are still pushed to the breaking point to complete the journey.
The Scooter Cannonball was first run by nine riders in 2004. By 2023, 180 riders participated in the Scooter Cannonball, which took place in late June and spanned over 3,000 miles from San Clemente, California, to Hilton Head, South Carolina. This year, there are more than 250 entrants. Most hail from the United States, but scooterists from Canada, Mexico, the U.K., and even Romania are also entered. And yes, they do have to pay for the privilege of trying to cover around 400 miles per day on machines that typically don't see more than forty miles of riding per day. Or per week.
Some of the boost in the event's popularity can likely be attributed to documentaries about the Scooter Cannonball, including The Big Scoot on Amazon Prime and It's Not A Race: The Scooter Cannonball Run (watch below).
Scooters must be street legal, have wheels ten inches in size or less and have single-cylinder engines. They must also be 'scooters' with leg shields and step-through frames. Some modifications are allowed but every scooter must undergo technical and safety checks, and displacement is capped at 300cc or the new breed of 'mega' or 'maxi' scooters, such as the Suzuki Burgman 400 and Honda Silverwing, would likely dominate. However, the engine size cap was raised from 278cc to 300 cc this year to allow some popular Yamaha, Honda, and other 300cc-class machines to enter. Scooters as small as 50cc, along with a separate class for the new range of 125cc 'mini motos,' such as the Honda Grom, also compete and are given handicaps. Many riders choose 150cc models since they are a good compromise in terms of speed, comfort, carrying capacity and reliability.
Ronald Sarayudej rode this Vespa 150 scooter in the 2023 Scooter Cannonball and managed to finish ... More well in his rookie outing.
Modern scooters are robust and technically sophisticated. They feature liquid cooled engines, fuel injection, disc brakes (some with ABS), sophisticated suspension, automatic transmissions, and top speeds approaching 80 miles an hour in the 300cc class. Those capabilities may make it seem like entering such a machine would make the Scooter Cannonball easy to complete, but keep in mind even those models are primarily designed for low-speed, short-duration rides in urban centers, not hours of wide-open throttle on American highways while fully loaded (or overloaded) with gear and extra fuel.
Before the race, the riders - who often go by colorful nicknames like 'BootScootinBenny,' 'Zwappy' and so on - are assigned numbers for tracking their progress. Riders must generally adhere to a set route and hit checkpoints within a specified time period, as well as consider riding to optional 'bonus' locations to earn extra points, albeit at the expense of time. While some riders have a support vehicle, most do not and must deal with any mechanical problems on their own. At night, the riders stay in hotels that have been reserved in advance. And yes, entrants can bring a passenger.
The small wheels on a scooter make for a highway riding experience that requires full-time concentration, and riders must keep constant tabs on mechanical issues, route directions and the larger vehicles around them.
Three riders from the Portland area competed in the Scooter Cannonball in 2023 for the first time and they all finished. For 2025, only one rider of the three, Virginia 'Wild Cherry' Cherry, now living in Alabama, is making a return to the event. She will be riding a 'modern' 250cc Vespa. You can track her progress and all of the other riders on this map.
Riders will leave Seaside, Oregon, on a staggered start beginning early Sunday the 22nd. They have a week to arrive at South Padre Island, Texas.
Thank you for reading. Subscribing to Forbes.com allows you to leave comments and supports contributors like myself. You can also follow me on Facebook and LinkedIn.
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