Cannonball Run writer Yates dies

Brock Yates, a longtime auto-racing journalist who helped launch the offbeat Cannonball Run races in the early 1970s and wrote the hit movie of the same name, has died. Yates died Oct. 5 in Batavia, N.Y., said his son, Brock Yates Jr. Yates was 82 and had been suffering from Alzheimer’s. For decades, Yates was an editor and columnist at Car and Driver, and he started the Cannonball Run to protest what he considered unduly strict traffic laws. He later became a screenwriter, working on Smokey and the Bandit II and then The Cannonball Run (1981). He also wrote more than a dozen books and was a racing commentator for CBS.