As NASA SoCal Spec Miata drivers were knocking the rust off for their first event at Chuckwalla Valley Raceway, NASA Arizona drivers already had rebooted their driving skills at Podium Club at Attesa the month before, and it showed in the early results at Chuckwalla.
Fighting a bout of oversteer on his car, 2025 regional and Teen Mazda Challenge national champion Eddie Yakin Vazquez spent a good bit of the race one fending off fellow Teen Mazda Challenge driver Jensen Mechelke.
As those two, battled back and forth, Jason Bleak was able to break away a bit. Bleak had dialed out a bit of negative camber to tune his car for the new Hoosier RCES tires, and he was focused on setting blazing lap times.
“They fought. They gave me plenty of room. I was looking ahead, relaxing, thinking, okay, let’s see if you can set the fastest lap kind of thing,” Bleak said after the race.
Later in the race, Mechelke and Yakin Vazquez figured out they were losing sight of Bleak, so they focused ahead instead of on each other. That allowed them to reel in Bleak until he made an error in the turn 11-12 sequence and he lost two positions to Yakin Vazquez and Mechelke.
“Eventually we stopped fighting and we were able to start catching back up to him and I think he noticed the gap was closing and tried to keep pushing and just overdrove and went off,” Yakin Vazquez said. “After that, Jensen basically stayed glued to my bumper, pressuring me the whole time. So he definitely picked up the pace from qualifying.”
At the checkered flag, it was Bleak who dropped to third, with Yakin Vazquez taking the win, followed by Mechelke in second.
“It was a tight race. P1 and I were fast. We were both right there,” Mechelke said. “It was a fun, great race. It was tight, really, really tight.”
For Sunday morning’s qualifying race, Yakin Vazquez fitted new tires to help get off the corners better, which appeared to help because he took first.
Following less than 2 seconds behind, Bleak had set a scorching 2:00.999-second lap time, breaking Yakin Vazquez’s 2:01.180-second track record from the same race and the 2:01.827 from the day before. However, Bleak suffered a major mechanical in the last lap. He pulled off track and went straight to his pits, skipping impound. Bleak ended up pushing his car back to his paddock space, so the record didn’t count.
“They threw the green a bit early, so I think that caught Jensen alongside me off. And so I was able to take the lead into turn one,” Yakin Vazquez said. “After that, it was just trying to manage the race, keep a consistent pace because he was running consistent laps behind me the whole time.”
For Sunday’s main, Yakin Vazquez chose the outside lane for pole position to open up the radius for the quick, right-left first turn that leads to the right-hand Turn 2. For much of the race, it was a replay of race one the day before. Mechelke tailed Yakin Vazquez the entire time. Mechelke was close enough to strike, but mixed-class racing was a factor, and he finished the race in second, just .209 seconds behind Yakin Vazquez.
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“Maybe a couple Bimmers didn’t think we were the leaders. And I mean, I get it, they’re racing, but I mean, if you see the leaders coming or lapping you, you got to let them by,” Mechelke said.
Yakin Vazquez credited the win to minimizing mistakes and maximizing consistency.
“Jensen was on me since the start of the race. I really just tried to run some consistent laps and hope I could pull away, but that definitely wasn’t the case. He was there every bit of the way and it just was not making any mistakes that really brought it home,” he said. “Once there’s someone within a car’s length behind you, you have to be able to recognize if they’re going for a dive bomb or a last second move, which can happen very quickly. So he actually went for one and we went side by side through the tightest two corners on the track, but I managed to make it stick through there.”
Battling for third were Spencer Douglass and Finley Stufkosky, who ran a faster fast lap, but finished behind Douglass. However, post race tech issued a DQ to Douglass, and the position went to Stufkosky.
NASA SoCal heads next to the recently sold Willow Springs International Raceway in late March, when the Spec Miata field will battle for supremacy at “the fastest road in the west.”
