Jamwest awaits Damage & Destruction
Published:Saturday | July 24, 2010 | 12:00 AM
Mario James, Gleaner Writer
Jamaicans do things a little differently from the rest of the world. Just a little. Dominoes, for example, when played in other countries will take on the demeanour of a high-stakes poker game. Quiet. Restrained. Emotionless.
In Jamaica, however, a newcomer to our shores might mistake the islanders' favourite pastime for a thinly veiled bar-room brawl that the participants have sitting down. The gesturing. The posturing. Animated, agitated gesticulation, coupled with name-calling that would make Marion Hall blush.
All the hallmarks of seriously inflated egos given full rein. How the average 'Miss Mavis shop' ramshackle domino table lasts for years under such abuse is a testimony to Jamaican ingenuity.
Park one of these egos next to 900 romping, screaming horses and really, we shouldn't expect more dignified behaviour ... .
Match racing has finally come of age in Jamaica. The Jamwest facility is arguably the only quarter-mile local track, and for years its drag promoters have been honing their steel to a razor's edge. At the centre of it all is a mantra that is debunked every time a certain white behemoth thunders down the Negril 1320.
Dean's mean machine
Jamaicans feel that American cars are unreliable, elephantine, inefficient and belong to days gone by. Import cars are the bane of the local eight-cylinder cars as they are regularly beat up on by the drivers of svelte, economical, street-driven cars that are dragon slayers in themselves as they do battle with iron from Detroit.
It must smart terribly, then, that the Jamaican doorslammer quarter-mile record is held by a steel-bodied 1969 Chevy Camaro.
Meet Dean Shaw. Dean is a study in contrasts. The owner of Rampage (the aforementioned white record-holding eight-cylinder fire-breathing dragon) has the record, but is humble; he sports tribal tattoos and gives speed secrets freely as opposed to the cloak-and-dagger stance that comes to point like porcupine quills when this reporter talks to some other outfits.
One might argue that he isn't Jamaican, but he is. One might argue that he is dispassionate, but he ain't. His car does the talking. Period.
Dean's doors-lammer is the only local car to run in the eight-second class. The only other vehicles that have gone faster locally are purpose-built rail dragsters (tube-frame vehicles that have no visual reference or resemblance to a car).
So every time his car hits the blacktop, it was simply an exhibition. An eight-second feast for the eyes and ears. Done in a vacuum. No one could race with him because they simply weren't in his league. (All this is tough for you, import guys, to take, isn't it? I know, I know).
Shaw has been calling for competition ever since he started fielding Rampage seven years ago. And the calls have been falling on deaf ears. Earlier this year, however, a diminutive Jamaican of Far East descent rowed his blue Evolution 7 into the nines. The rice burners felt they had arrived.
Soon the obligatory call to slap leather was sounded; Craig Lue's Evolution 7 looked as if it finally had the chutzpah to take on the mountain-motored Camaro. The race that ensued was epic in its proportions, but anticlimactic in execution, as Jamwest's concrete surface could not contain all the unholy horses that were summoned by Shaw's right foot that day: The car went into tyre shake and he had to pedal the car mid-track. However, he still clocked a commendable 9.13 to Lue's 9.5, the Camaro a humbling five car lengths ahead.
But Lue is nothing if not systematic. His learning curve started with the front-wheel drive 'Yellow Banana', a '93 Honda Civic hatchback. This car that took him deep into the 10-second bracket before he decided to go four-wheel drive Mitsubishi. With 880hp on tap in his present car that he claims weighs 2,600lb with driver, conventional wisdom says he has ponies in the corral to run eights.
The weak link, he says, is the 'H' pattern gearbox that he uses.
"I don't use a shift light," he says. "It's all done by feel and what the tach(ometer) says. I did a 9.3 last time out - and the data logger said I spent more than 0.4 sec on the limiter. I messed up an eight-second run."
The dam has burst
He's by no means alone, though. The import aficionados are coming out of the bulwark. Two more import-drivin' contenders that have smashed the 10-second barrier flat. Errol 'Simtech' Simpson from St Mary has put together a 9.9-sec run at the last meet in his SR20-powered '92 Nissan Sunny.
Damian 'Damage' Allen's Evo III sports 790 horses on a good day before he presses a button to release a claimed 100 more. When he timed 9.5 last meet, he did so with a close ratio gearbox that locked out fifth on the big end and boost levels that were turned down from 35 to 27 psi - coupled with a fuel pressure drop to done stabilise fuel/air. We haven't seen the best from that team, not by a long shot.
And then there's Keroy Scott. Master of the 1JZ. Experience personified. His white Mark II engined Corolla station wagon laid waste to all in the 10-second class two years ago and put some serious hurtin' on the big boys. Sydney Knott's '73 Camaro still hasn't recovered from that knockout two years ago.
Keroy toured the Caribbean with his 'White Knight' and on his return promptly put it to pasture. Why? Keroy has a hankering for the 8s, and he thought that the Station Wagon was too heavy. So he fabbed up a complete frame and wrapped it in 60 series two-door Starlet. Motivated by a hybrid 1JZ 'headed' 2JZ engine bottom half, doing fabrication as only he can (nine-inch rear ends run in his family. Not everybody knows that he shortens the rear ends and re-splines them HIMSELF). While the car is in an advanced state of readiness, there is a lot still to be done - so the car might not be finished in time for the upcoming September 19 meet. But if it is ... .
Meanwhile, the trash talking has begun. While this meet is supposed to be more about the tuned eight-cylinder cars that have recently come to prominence - like Desmond Lee's similar '69 Camaro - testosterone has started to get the better of most of the Japanese car lovers. They think they have a real shot at the king of the hill.
So as we wait for for high noon, the air is thick with who-saids and what-he's-runnings and why-'im-a-gwaan-sos. We fans would have it no other way.