Andy Jaenen | Drift Judge
Judging at a drift event is a hard job for sure. D1 Japan and Formula D USA are always working with professional judges, but in Europe you always saw different faces in the jury. Quiet often there were big discussions after the events on the judging.
Our Skylimit judge, Andy Jaenen, is starting to become a big name in drift judging all over Europe. In the past he judged at rounds of the following championships :
- BE-NL & Benelux driftseries 2005 & 2006
- Xtreme Drift Championship 2007
- French Drift Series 2007
- IDS Germany 2008
- NL Invitationals 2008
- ODC 2009
- French Drift Challenge 2009
- Super Drift Series Poland 2009
- Yokohama Drift Cup Belgium 2009
Recently Andy was asked by organiser Niall Gunn to judge the JDM Allstars @ Wembley London. Together with James Hudson, Andy Jaenen had to judge the biggest drift event in Europe. They had to judge the non seeded qualifying, superlap and the Top 32 battles. The top drivers from all over Europe were at a level never seen. The 2 most challenging points of the track were "the wall" and "the jump". After 2 fantastic days of smoke, show and a big crowd it was Dan Chapman who won the event in his Drift works Nissan ahead of Paul Vlasblom and Remmo Niezen.
Quote Andy Jaenen : "Judging at this level is a real honour. You have to watch all the details because the driving standard is that high. During national events you often give a 5/5 if the difference is only small between the drivers, but the small details were the only difference you could see between this level of drivers. There was a good interaction between judges and drivers all weekend. And one thing very important : the higher the level of the drivers, the more respect they have for the judging. I hope to be judging at this level more often."