Garry Jennings mounted a comeback drive to snatch sixth overall on the latest round of the British Rally Championship.

The Kesh driver set several top four times as he recorded his best BRC finish of the season on the Trackrod Rally in Yorkshire, recovering from a slow start to surge through the pack from a lowly 14nth.

“I had a very bad run on Friday night in the dark. We got wiped!” admitted Garry.

“I don’t really know what went wrong, just a different car in the dark and in the woods. It’s just getting used to the car because everything was different in the dark.

“I stalled on the stage and knew I had dropped 15 or 20 seconds there, but not a minute and a half.

“We did the stage again for the last stage of the rally and when I went through it then I was a minute and a half quicker, and I knew then where I had dropped it all. I don’t mind losing ten or 20 seconds to those boys, but a minute and a half was too much, and it was good to get back on their tails again by the end.”

Garry had struggled to break into the top ten overall on the previous rounds of the series, but some recent changes in the set up of his Fiesta have given him an injection of pace and on the daylight stages on Saturday he was quickly back on the pace of the front runners.

Fourth quickest on the second stage helped him climb back to eighth as he entered the final stage, and another quick time on the famous Dalby test saw him leapfrog another two competitors to move into sixth overall and second in class.

“I was happy because my times were good,” he said. “I was 14th and I came back to sixth, and if I had another stage I would have got back to fourth or fifth. I had two top four times, and it was good to get back on the pace of those BRC boys. It’s getting better. I think they were quite surprised at our times as well. Keith Cronin was a British Champion and he only beat us on one stage on the Saturday.”

Garry’s recent busy schedule continues when he returns to the tarmac roads of Donegal this weekend to contest the Harvest Rally. The event, based in Donegal Town, takes place on Sunday October 3 and will consist of two stages done three times each, with the drivers covering 90 kilometres of competitive driving.