Here we go!!!!! The 5th year King of Europe Drift season is here! And there were no better place than Serbia to open this new exciting season, good weather, good place and huge local enthusiasm about drifting is the
perfect mix for this opening round of the KW King of Europe Series.
The first major story was 2008 champion Kees Kok missing this first round as well as 2008 runner up Zoltan Lakatos having major issues with his infamous M3 pickup V8 Kompressor the whole week-end. Zoltan was not able to show up his right skills and gave up in 1/4 final of the Top16….
On the other side Adam Kerenyi was the #1 favorite for this round with the Dotz BMW E36 M3 but the red M3 wasn’t the only thing that the competitors had to worry about. A furious squad of local serbian drifters were there to show the foreigners what drifting is all about, and the leader of this squad is without a doubt Bojan Kurbalija running a freshly built BMW E30 V8 4.4L.
Despite the difficult obstacles facing the seasoned drivers, a few new horses like Todor Dunev and Matt Zaitsev made it to the top 16. Furthermore, Todor fought his way through Marino Piric and Dejan Susic
to make it to the final four. Unfortunately, Todor was stopped by the overstressed Bojan Kurbalija and then made a mistake against Kovacik in the 3rd place final but for sure keep an eye on this newcomer!
Another shocker was Nicolas Heyer making a very uncharacteristic forced error against Nikolett Szanto. But Nikolett then was stopped by Norbert Kovacic in the next round, with both mistakes made by each drifters, one more time made the decision. But we can’t wait to see new Nikolett’s car at round 2, V8 5.0L powered Z4….
The semi-final battle between Kurbalija and Dunev was so evenly matched that the judges were forced to call a “one more time” and even with the extra runs it was almost too close to call, but in the end the decision
went to Kurbalija joining Kerenyi in final.
But with Kurbalija running in a spare car after having major issues with his main car, Kerenyi took the final win with no mistake and showing very high skills during top16. Perfect week-end for Adam Kerenyi taking
the lead of the championship, followed by “badluck” hero Bojan and in third place Norbert Kovacik aka “Noro”, it seems that this season is going to be full of surprises. I wouldn’t make any bets for the
championship yet….
Last but not least, with drivers from 10 different nations in this first top16, “King of Europe” remains the one and only true european series….