The message came across the police scanner in October 2006 as Alexander Roy was driving his 2000 BMW M5 west on Interstate 44 in Oklahoma: “I have a report of a blue BMW speeding, weaving in and out of traffic and driving recklessly. Be advised.”

Roy said he heard it shortly after he and his co-driver, David Maher, had been exceeding 150 miles an hour. As Maher scanned the prairie through binoculars for a place to hide, the car’s radar detectors lighted up. They decided to exit the highway and feign a bathroom break while a support team in a Cessna overhead searched for the speed trap that would inevitably materialize.

Having temporarily escaped, Roy eased back onto the highway. As he approached two state police vehicles waiting on the median, he ducked to the right of a tractor-trailer in a move he called “the cross-country racer’s ideal police line-of-sight blocking position.”

The maneuver, he said, enabled him to break a 23-year-old illegal endurance-driving record by navigating from New York to Los Angeles in 31 hours 4 minutes. He said he recorded an average speed of 90.1 m.p.h. over a mapped route of 2,794 miles.