What happened was Fres had 5 x trophies and wanted 5 x Sandman categories, find a winner for each category and then rank the 5 x vans.

So the categories I came up with in consultation with Fres and Rod were:

A - Most authentic Sandman restoration.
B - Best surviving Sandman (best unrestored / least restored).
C - Best modified Sandman.
D - Most sympathetically modified Sandman - essentially least "non-factory" modifications and keeping the basic look of the original car but improved.
F - Encouragement award. This was left to be subjective on the day.

E was going to be best replica Sandman as we thought there was to be 6 x trophies, but I was glad not to judge a class E as there were 24 x Sandman vans to judge (that I could find) and with as much as 15 minutes on each car that is 6 hours straight and I needed every bit of it. There would have been another 15 at least replicas, even though I think the winner quality wise probably would have been the L36 M20 WB van done up as HJ - it was beautifully done.

There was never going to be a Concours class - it'd need multiple people and very hard to judge due to so many factors.
We also didn't judge the show class cars in the hall like Brutal or Street legal as there was no real way to have them compete against the modified Sandmans outside, and I think at least four of these were wearing Sandman ID plates.

A was the hardest category, there were some pretty nice restorations done. In the end given the time allowed per vehicle the incorrect items per car were listed and the car with the least items wrong was the winner. This was the Bordeaux HX van (photo in last post on page 4 of the photo thread by Sandman Sozza). Runners up (close) were the Chrome Yellow HQ van entered by Oz and then Rod and Jennie's Madiera Red van.

B was easy, the best fit for this class was the Atlantis Blue HZ - the van in the last 2 x photos on page 4 of the photo thread.

C was tough too, there were some nice modified vans and this is a subjective category as much as it is technical. My choice was the Tuxedo black with Chamois/Black trim HX (I haven't seen a photo of it yet). It was essentially Sandman to look at but had substantial mods to it. Could have also fitted into class D at a pinch.

Class D was a tricky one too, there were lots of Sandmans with subtle mods. The car that I really liked and was a car of very high quality was the Mandarin Red L32 M20 HJ XY5 (photo below, one of the few total car photos I got time to take). This car first strikes you as a very nice HJ, but look close and it has some very subtle but pleasing modifications.

HJ.jpg

Class F I ended up giving to the Chrome Yellow HQ L31 (2nd photo on page 6 of the photo thread). It needs a fair few things fixed but once they are done it would take out class A easily and probably be #1 ranked overall.

Afterwards Rod rang me and said they actually had 6 x trophies and wanted to make a 2nd encouragement award. After some thought I gave that to the HZ which is the 4th photo down in Innuendo's post at the top of page 6 of the photo thread.

Overall rankings I gave to (in order) B, D, A, C and then the 2 x encouragement awards.

In the end this wasn't an easy task, with so many vans to look at after I found them. Some I had to get Jennie (thanks Jen!) to help me find the owners as the bonnets were down and I couldn't tell if they were Sandmans or not. However it was a fun task - it took me from around 8am right through to about 3.30pm non stop. If this is ever going to happen again the classes and criteria would probably need some work, and probably multiple judges. And would need to have the owners entering the vans send all ID details in with the entry form so we could identify most of the Sandmans early making them easier to find. I was lucky that all but one or two Sandmans were easy to identify by the tags, the others all that could be done was to take the owner's word.

In the end my 3 x favorite vans of the whole day were:

The grey HD that Jennie posted up a photo of on page 6 of the photo thread.
The HJ van in this post.
This one:
Overlander.jpg