When J.J. and Victor are being taken to the hospital after the boat crash, J.J. asks the paramedic how far it is to the hospital and how long it will take to get there. The paramedic tells him they're about ten miles from the hospital, but it will only take four or five minutes to get there due to the ambulance's ability to get through traffic. This gives J.J. and Victor the idea to use one in the race. When they get pulled over during the race, the police officer tells them they were going a hundred and twenty. That's about how fast you would need to go to cover ten miles in four or five minutes.
When Blake and Fenderbaum see J.J. and Victor at the starting line, they decide that the pair are their main competition and make plans to delay them. They may have a point. J.J. and Victor start the race after them and Blake and Fenderbaum are behind them just before performing their sabotage. The sabotage puts them ahead of J.J. and Victor, but the next time we see them, they're again behind J.J. and Victor.
Cannonball Run II has been criticized for the race after the fight at the Pinto Ranch being compressed into a Travel Montage and the winner not being revealed until the last second. But due to being an Actionized Sequel, the plot became more about rescuing the Sheik from the mob than the race itself. The race was treated like a non-issue because it seemed like it in comparison.
J.J. gives Victor a severe dressing down (literally, he rips off his Captain Chaos mask and cape) when the latter forgoes punching the time clock for saving someone's dog. His criticism is rather harsh and there were no doubt viewers thinking "Dude, it's just a race." But remember the opening scene of the sequel. The Sheik tells his father that there's no race that year. Apparently, that was the last known running of the Cannonball before the Sheik organized his own and J.J. thought he'd never get the opportunity to win it again.
In the second film, the mobsters try to kidnap the Sheik four times. The first three times (claws mounted on a car, a magnet mounted on a helicopter, a cable strung between two billboards) fail while the fourth (a woman flashes the Sheik, enticing him to stop) succeeds. The first three all failed for the same reason: whatever the equipment was mounted on failed (the car broke in half, the helicopter was unable to lift the car, the cable ripped right through the billboard). This is why the flasher succeeded: she wasn't mounted on anything.
The race organizer's speech in the first film starts with him comparing the race to the Bay of Pigs Invasion. In real life, the race was organized as a protest against the then impending fifty-five mile-an-hour national speed limit. Both failed. The Bay of Pigs Invasion failed to oust Castro from power while America's national speed limit was set to fifty-five despite the protest.
