Mishra, Metge solidify lead, Gill slips to 8th place

Samrat Yadav (driving Toyota Fortuner) and Lhapka Tsering (driving Polaris ATV) jumped dramatically up the leaderboard to climb to the second and fourth position even as Team Sparky Garages Aabhishek Mishra (driving Maruti Suzuki Vitara) held on to his lead after SS6 of Desert Storm here on Friday.

Samrat (with co-driver Kunal Kashyap; 03:00:44) and Tsering (co-driver Venu Rameshkumar; 02:53:46) recorded some of the best timings of the morning in the Extreme Category to be snapping at Mishra's heels.

They even left APRC champion and strong contender Gaurav Gill of Team Mahindra in the shade, who slipped from his overnight second position to languish in the eighth position. Gaurav had a rough day, taking as much as 04:09:26 to complete the morning stage.

Defending champion Mishra continued to show his class, taking the least time (02:49:49) to conquer the stage and stay ahead of the field. His Sparky teammate Capt AVS Gill (Diwakar Kalia) too was in top form, moving up one place to be in the third position.

In the Moto category, TVS Racing's Adrian Metge and Honda Motorsports' CS Santosh continued to battle for supremacy, with the former maintaining his lead and the latter improving his time to narrow the gap.

France' Metge was not at his fastest, needing 02:46:40 to complete SS6 on his bike, but it was good enough to keep him ahead of the pack. Santosh recorded the morning's fastest time (02:44:30) while another TVS stalwart Abdul Wahid Tanvir ran the stage in 02:45:56 to be in the third position.

With the temperature going past 50 degrees, 8 more bikers and 4 drivers in Extreme category fell by the wayside, exactly doubling the tally after two and a half days of acute racing.

--IANS

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