JK Tyre Rally of Himalayas enters Zanskar, honours late champion Hari Singh

Hari Singh never got to drive into Zanskar. The five time national rally champion, nicknamed the Gypsy King for the way he could place a Maruti Gypsy on terrain no other car found, died when a speedboat capsized off the Maldives in March 2026, as Carlelo and Outlook Traveller reported at the time. He had long since moved out of the cockpit to run motorsport operations for JK Tyre. On September 26, six months after his death, JK Tyre's rally rolled out of Manali carrying a tribute to him into a part of the Himalaya his own generation never raced.

The JK Tyre Rally of Himalayas 2026, now in its sixth edition since the rally began in 2021, flagged off near Manali's Span Resort and finished four days later, on September 30, in Padum, the headquarters of Ladakh's Zanskar valley, organisers Himalayan Xtreme Motorsports and Adventure X Fusion Tribe said, according to the Tribune. It was the rally's first run into Zanskar at all, crossing Kunzum La and Shinku La, both above 16,500 feet, before Pensi La on the approach to Padum, per the Tribune's reports from the flag off and the finish.

For a rider or driver in India weighing a season of rally raid or a long drive north, that single fact matters more than who won. Zanskar has stayed mostly off the national motorsport calendar because of its altitude, its short window of road access each year and the distance between any two points a service crew can reach in time. The Department of Tourism, UT Ladakh backed this edition specifically to put Zanskar on the adventure map, the Tribune reported, the same push slowly opening the valley to touring riders outside the Chadar trek season.

140 competitors entered across three categories: 80 riders in Moto, including one woman, 35 crews in Extreme, including two women drivers and five Army teams, and 24 in the TSD category, including four women, the Tribune's flag off report said.

The names that finished

Dhritimaan Singh won the Moto class, ahead of Happy Verma and Nitish Bharadwaj, IANS reported. In Xtreme, Rajiv Yadav and co-driver Rohit Gowda took the title over Aaryak Rana and Aditya Sharma, with Daksh Gill and Virender Kashyap third. Soham Hazra and Nirav Mehta won the Adventure category ahead of Santosh HM and Prakash Muthusamy, with Chandra Mouli and Sri Sakthi Kumar N third, the Tribune's finish report said. One 72 km special stage was run twice, once each way, through the Zanskar high country, and speeds there touched 200 km/h, according to IANS.

Not everyone reached Padum. Lakhpa Tsering, who won the old Raid de Himalaya in 2015, retired with technical trouble, IANS reported, a small reminder that the rally now running under JK Tyre's banner is not quite the event an earlier generation of Indian rallying grew up on. That older Raid de Himalaya, run by the Himalayan Motorsport Association from 1999 to 2018 and once listed on the FIA and FIM's international calendars as the world's highest rally raid, went only as far as Srinagar on its 2009 route, according to its Wikipedia record. This year's rally went further into the mountains than that one ever did, without the man whose tribute it carried ever getting to see it.

No dates are out yet for a seventh edition. If Zanskar's roads and its brief window before winter shuts them hold up to a bigger field next year, the valley the Gypsy King never raced could become a fixture on the calendar he spent his working life building.

Sources