Willow Springs Raceway, June 8-9, 2002

It is amazing how luck changes sometimes. Read on and you will know why.

I was hoping that this race weekend would be w/o mechanical failures and mental errors. It did not happen but Team Contrarian still won both races this weekend.

Saturday morning during practice the car felt really good. It felt buttoned down and the suspension tweaks that I have done on Friday at home seemed to be working. Power was aplenty even though the car was 100 lbs heavier than Kojima/Paule. I was also running my 98 open diferential tranny (last one I have). Winning was the furthest from my mind due to the disadvantages.

A red CRX puts two wheels off at Rabbit's Ear (turn two) and showers my car with all kinds of rocks two laps before the end of practice. I make nothing
of it and continue. I enter the pits and while my brother is taking tire temps Luis points out that the car is leaking water. Apparently an errant rock hit the radiator and punched a hole in it. I was disgusted, I wanted to quit. How many mechanical failures can a man take!!! Jude said "we came here to race and we will race." My older brother has spoken. We are staying.

So I head off to town to try and find a radiator while Judes removes the busted one. No luck. But I get the phone number of "The Radiator Shop" in Lancaster from a parts stores. I call him. He says "bring the radiator down and I will fix it for you in 15 min." So I fly back to the track pick Jude and the radiator up and I drive the Tundra @ 90 mph to Lancaster.

We reach the shop and it is huge, very clean, and organized. Damn, very impressive. I hand over the radiator and they immediately drop all other work and start on it. I send Jude to get water in the meantime while I wait for the radiator to be fixed.

Jude is back. The radiator is fixed and we are off back to the track. We get to the track and qualifying is being announced for my race group. Shit!!!! We start working on the radiator and all the cars are on the track qualifying. I strap in the car while Jude continues to fill the radiator with water and NEO cooling material. Jude gives me the signal and I am off.

I am on the track with cold tires and no warmup to the engine. I do two laps before the checkered flag. My Hotlapper flashes 1:39.997 on the second lap. That was good enough to take POLE position. Unbelieveable.

We grid for the race and there were three cars between my car and Paule's. I had a really good cushion. We take the green flag and I have an excellent start and I jump from 7th to 4th overall. And I drive hard like always. I literally check out on all the other SE-Rs and I am racing the Spec racers and Don Mock's CRX. Four laps before the end of the race, the tires started to give. The car felt really wierd. It was losing traction. So i slow down knowing that I have a good cushion. I give up all the places I gained on the start. Paule catches up, but It was not enough. I WIN my first race. In the pits Jude and I take a look at the front tires. Half of the tread on the two front tire rack heat cycled and track heat cycled Kumhos came off and the other half was pitted. WOW. I was shocked. This never happened before. So now we were down to the two rear good tires and the older set of Kumhos.

Sunday started out trying to figure out the tire problem. Why did an almost brand new set of Kumhos partially shred? Was it my driving? Was it the heat? Was it the tire pressure?

So Sunday practice we ran a used pair of Kumhos up front and the partially shredded pair in the back. We lowered the tire temperature up front from the 33 cold that I usually run to 30 cold. We also lowered the rears a bit. We had to preserve a solid set of tires. We had two really good tires that we ran on the rear of the car in Sat's race and two decent tires from an old Kumho set. The problem was that they were on different rims. Two were on K1s +38 offset and two were on Volks +43 offset. But with the magic of spacers the offset problem was solved. I had a set of 5 mm spacers and a set of 10 mm spacers. You do the math.

In practice I ran 8 hot laps and came to the pits for tire temps. The temps were high at 197 deg. In a longer race the temps would climb even higher and the tire would shred again. So we lowered the psi even more.

For qualifying we put the race tires on and we brought the front temps down to 27 psi hoping that will lower the tire temp. The negative camber on the car was 2.7 deg and the toe-out 1/8. I ran 8 hot laps and scored 1:39.467 on my hotlapper. That was 1.624 sec faster than Paule. so I took Pole again. Yes!!! But Paule had closed the gap 2.326 sec gap over Sat. Now he sat one car behind me. The car behind me was Don Mock's CRX. I out qualified him :-)

Before the race Jude and I got a chance to talk to Mike Yepes. And thank god we did. He tells us that Kumhos do not like high tire pressure at all. The consensus is to run them at 33 psi HOT. We were running that much COLD. So we lowered the psi in the front to 26 and the rear to around 25 and we
decided to risk all in the race.

I knew that it will be a very close race and it was a nail bitter. I could not get a good hole shot. A red spec racer was blocking my left lane and I would had to go in the dirt to pass him. Paule was on my right and had the outside lane. We stayed door to door all the way through rabbit's ear and just before the turn three prior to the up hill climb Paule tucks behind me.

During the first few laps I was pulling away, but as I felt the tires lose traction I pulled back. I decided not to race the spec racers nor Mock's CRX and worry about the threat behind me. The startegy was to preserve the tires and win at the same time.

I would pull away from Paule on the back and front straights and he will pull on me in the Omega turns. And so it went lap after lap after lap. Then the white flag came. Last lap and last chance for Paule to pass. So in the Omega turns he tucks real tight behind me and coming out of five onto six he is on the outside drag racing me door to door on the back straights. My heart sank. I thought I was done for. But one sentence was on my mind "I will not be denied." I kept telling myself this. For me it was either I win this race or I come dead last. We kept door to door through 7. Coming into 8 Paule backs off since it is almost impossible to take 8 that fast and make it through 9. He tucks in behind me. We both slow down a bit to enter 9 and as I exit 9 I could hear my tires skip to the edge. Oh shit I am going to drop my left two tires in the dirt. But miracles happen and the tires stopped inches from the dirt. Paule on the other hand was not so lucky and he dropped both tires in the dirt.

As I cross the finish line, I wave my fist in victory and defiance. Yeah baby. The underdog won two races in a row. My overweight, undersprung, unsponsored, open-diffed race car has defeated the best in the SR class. Paule had practiced on Friday, did an Enduro on Sat and still did not manage to beat me. I am going to savor this win for a long time to come. Mirror, mirror on the wall who is the best driver in the SE-R Cup? NAJI DAHI

We check the tires and they are still in great shape. So it seems that Kumhos do not like high psi on hot days on a fast track. Lesson learned. From now on when I run Kumhos I will not exceed 33 psi HOT.

So who do I thank? Two people. My Awesome brother and Mike Yepes. I would have thanked my sponsors, but I do not have any :-)

Naji...feeling real good