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Gone in 9.75 SecondsOctober 10, 2003 Driver-Builder-Actor Ali Afshar makes his briefest public appearances on BFGoodrich® tires You're more likely to see Ali Afshar as an actor on your TV screen than you are to catch him at the drag strip. That's because his drag strip performances in his Subaru WRX are brief — recently under 10 seconds — while his frequent TV and movie screen appearances under his stage name Alex Dodd are of considerably more duration. While many racers have two careers — racing and a racing-related business — not so many have three — with the third being a successful acting career. As Alex Dodd, Ali has appeared in episodes of JAG, the King of Queens, and the movies Under Siege, The President's Men (with Chuck Norris) and Godzilla. Ali built his own successful street racers while going through college in the San Fernando valley outside Los Angeles, and the style and speed of his cars attracted customers. "I put myself through school building cars for people," Afshar says. "Everybody used to come to me to build them cool cars." Ali has always put performance in a street-legal package, like his racing WRX. "Everything I built was streetable. Then and now." His business —Easy Street Motorsports— evolved, and along with it, his record-setting turbo WRX. Based in the Los Angeles suburb of Valley Village, Easy Street Motorsports offers three stages of high performance tune for the WRX, all three street legal. The top package is the ESX 740, an 800 HP package available to anyone with the roughly $28,000 price of the package (added to the cost of the car). Ali says he made the 4WD Subaru his vehicle of choice because of what he saw as untapped quarter-mile performance potential. "I was attracted to the Subaru by its platform — turbocharged, intercooled — and used my hotrod background on it." After turning a 9.98 and 141.9 MPH at Bakersfield last March, Ali has been named Racer of the Month by B&M Racing, suppliers of the automatic transmission in the red Subaru WRX, which he has since dubbed the ESX. Since then he has scored an NHRA win in Oregon, and then a win at Sonoma with a sizzling 9.75 @ 137.98 MPH. He is a three-time B&M Racer of the Month, and has won four drag race events in a row, competing in both NHRA and IDRC. Ali thinks the sport-compact performance boom is just beginning. He predicts much more corporate involvement in producing performance for the street, from the well-known speed and aftermarket names that have primarily focused on rear-wheel drive American V8s. "I think we're going to see (major performance) companies get involved in sport-compact performance in a big way," Ali says. "I also think we're going to see more and more serious performance cars coming from the manufacturers, and we're going to see more all-wheel drive performance cars." How do you get a street-equipped, 3200-lb. all-wheel drive sedan to turn a sub-10 second quarter? For starters, Ali's car puts out lots of power. The trick is getting it on the pavement. Ali says with an automatic transmission and all-wheel drive, you can't do the burnouts that rear-wheel drivers do both to heat the tires and please the crowd. "It's very difficult to do a 4-wheel-drive burnout," Ali says, "because usually the rear- or front-wheel-drive cars can lock up the wheels that aren't powered, which holds the car in place so that the powered wheels can spin. In 4WD there are no non-powered wheels, so there is nothing to hold it down. "Also, burning out is usually to heat up the tires for added traction," Ali adds, "and with 4WD there really is no need for added traction. That is the only advantage of a burnout: added traction." Traction is where Ali appreciates the P255/50R16 BFGoodrich® Drag Radial tires, front and rear. "They do the job without needing to heat up too much," Ali says. "We deflate the tires to 15 pounds, and they just grip! And they're very consistent." No other tire company offers the range of world-champion performance tires for sport compacts. BFGoodrich® g-Force™ tires hold the current import and domestic world records for street radial drag racing* — the same tires that post the best cornering mark (1.08g) ever recorded by one leading testing organization**. And the hottest up-to-the-minute looks and sizes anywhere, including the world's first sport compact dub. *as of 11/23/03; ** as of 6/10/04. Atricle by David Barry Photo courtesy Easy Street Motorsports |
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