Jas Mangat has continued to overcome mechanical woes to go on and secure results during his outings in the two Africa Rally Championship rounds.
He had an incident at the Equator Rally in Kenya, and now at the just concluded Pearl of Africa Rally over the weekend.
Mangat and Joseph Kamya in the Mitsubishi EvoX are already proved pacesetters in Uganda.
However, they started the first loop of th is year’s Pearl Rally on a rather low pace. In the second loop on Saturday, the crew advanced their pace to top stages four and five. But, their sublime performance was short-lived after an oil leakage ended their contention at the start of stage six.
The crew restarted the rally on Sunday under the super rally rule. They finished the rally in third position in the ARC category and sixth position overall.
“Being on a podium is amazing, we got very good points for the championship. We are working on going all out for this championship and a podium is very important.
“We could have done more but the car let us down and we had nothing much to do,” said Mangat.
The final day saw Mangat embroiled in a fight for second with Kenya’s Rio Smith.
Only 38 seconds separated the two with the final kilometres.
The battle between the two crews made the highlight of the day in the rally ending Super Special stage.
It was Smith that carried the day by a mere three seconds.
“We didn’t get the time early after penalties were added. We later realised we had a 38-second gap with Smith. Two stages were remaining and one was canceled. So we had to push, but we could only get 35 seconds back,” he explained.
The third position placed Mangat second on the ARC leaderboard with 44 points, 12 points behind compatriot Yasin Nasser.