hyperelastic material in contact with a rigid material

I'm trying to model the stresses in a hyperelastic material as it's removed from a highly rigid material (which is acting as a mold). I've set up a time-dependent model with the two materials, a contact pair with friction between them, and prescribed a velocity at the top of the hyperelastic material, but am having convergence problems.

I've tried playing with the meshing (mapped works best), the material properties, the initial values (mod1.u should be initial-value based) and several other things. For the lowest-strain cases (the first value in the parametric sweep in the attached file) the simulation runs fine, but for the higher-strain cases (all other values), the simulation fails before completion.

I'd appreciate any suggestions you have as to how I could improve this!

Kind regards,
Allison