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Dreamt up from a Hollywood movie, it was set to put the Northern Territory on the global stage.
It was a 4,000-kilometre high-speed desert sprint from Darwin to Uluru and back.
The entry requirements? An ordinary driver's licence and a fast car.
If they had the grunt, cars would be travelling at eye-watering speeds in excess of 200 kilometres an hour.
Helmets and fireproof suits for drivers were recommended only.
Motorsport legend Allan Moffat was the brainchild of the ambitious plan — to use the territory's long stretches of desert highway and unique lack of speed restrictions.
Named after a 1980s blockbuster movie about an illegal cross-country car race, the NT Cannonball Run was the first event of its kind to be sanctioned and made a reality.
But well before the rubber hit the road, the ill-fated drift was shrouded in controversy and alarm bells tolled over its safety credentials.
Alarm bells sounded
Disaster struck on Day 3 of the event. It was May 24, 1994, around 9:30am when a Japanese Ferrari-driving duo crashed into two race officials, killing all four of them.
Thirty years on, it is still considered the worst crash in Australian motorsport history.
"There were a whole lot of well-intentioned people, and it seemed like a half-alright idea," recalls Paul Gover, a veteran motoring journalist who competed at the event.
"It was always going to be for people with deep pockets and fast cars."
Revheads from around the world descended on the Northern Territory to flex their motoring muscle.
Even the sultan of Brunei was rumoured to be in attendance.
Prophetic words offered up to press
The Cannonball had the staunch backing of then-NT chief minister Marshall Perron, a hardcore revhead himself.
Rather prophetically, the day before the dash began, Moffat told a crowded press pack: "Just because you drive a Ferrari, doesn't make you a Ferrari driver."
Akihiro Kabe was a Japanese dentist with a penchant for sports cars, including his show-stopping Ferrari F-40, which had been clocked at speeds breaching 280kph along the Stuart Highway.
The night before Kabe met his end, Gover got chatting with him and his navigator Takeshi Okano.
"They were not particularly memorable," reflects Gover.
"They didn't strike me as being professional motorsport people. They were just people out having a good time."
On the day of the crash, the Japanese duo headed south from Lasseters Casino in Alice Springs to roaring applause of roadside crowds.
A navigation mistake minutes in saw the men slow down, before realising they had lost ground they needed to make up for.
They entered a checkpoint 95km south of town at excessive speeds, with the route instructions failing to mention a right-hand sweep at its entrance.
"So they sped up and then arrived unexpectedly at the finish control, skidded on loose gravel where the control had been set up, and crashed into a bunch of people in cars who were at the end of the section," he said.
Those men, race officials Tim Linklater and Keith Pritchard, were killed on impact, bringing the total number of fatalities to four.
"It was a combination of a whole lot of factors that you couldn't recreate if you were writing a movie script to get this to happen the way it did," Gover says.
Bizarrely, the Cannonball Run continued that day.
It was ultimately won by the Porsche 911 Turbo of Ron Conrad with the return leg to Darwin taking crews back past the site of the crash, which had been adorned with flowers.
What was meant to be an annual event became a one-off, and any hopes of some positive publicity for the Northern Territory had the opposite effect.
Today, just off the Stuart Highway at the site of the crash, a monument serves as a reminder of the tragedy of the first and last Cannonball Run.