Sports Car Club of America (SCCA) Trans Am events at the Laguna Seca Raceway on 8 October 1978 and finished 46 laps. Coast-to-coast run Two Hot Rod staffers, John Fuchs and Clyde Baker, entered a 1972 AMC Hornet in the Cannonball Baker Sea-To-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash. This was an unofficial automobile race from New York City and Darien, CT, on the U.S. Atlantic coast, to Redondo Beach, a Los Angeles suburb on the Pacific coast during the time of the newly imposed speed limit set by the National Maximum Speed Law. The Hornet X hatchback was modified with a AMC V8 and auxiliary racing fuel cells to increase gasoline capacity. They finished in 13th place after driving for 41 hours and 15 minutes at an average speed of . In popular culture As part of a significant product placement movie appearance by AMC, a 1974 Hornet X Hatchback is featured in the James Bond film: The Man with the Golden Gun, where Roger Moore made his second appearance as the British secret agent. The film's "most outrageous sequence" begins with Sheriff J.W. Pepper, who, on holiday in Thailand with his wife, is admiring a new, red AMC Hornet in a Bangkok showroom. He is about to test drive the car. The action begins as James Bond commandeers the Hornet from the dealership with Pepper in it for a car chase. The Hornet performs an "airborne pirouette as it makes a hold-your-breath jump across a broken bridge". The stunt car is significantly modified with a redesigned chassis to place the steering wheel in the center and a lower stance, as well as larger wheel wells, compared to the stock Hornet used in all the other movie shots. The 360-degree mid-air twisting corkscrew was captured in just one filming sequence. Seven tests were performed in advance before the one jump performed by an uncredited British stuntman "Bumps" Williard for the film with six (or eight, depending on the source) cameras simultaneously rolling. Two frogmen were positioned in the water, as well as an emergency vehicle and a crane were ready, but not needed. The Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory (CAL) was used for computer modeling to calculate the stunt. The modeling called for a weight of car and driver, the exact angles and the distance between the ramps, as well as the launch speed. This stunt was adapted from Jay Milligan's Astro Spiral Javelin