Remembering Ken Block

By: Owen Oseroff

Ken Block is an inspiration to all gear heads around the world. A guy that could do almost anything with a car, insane control, total bravery, and unbelievable skill. There were so many aspects to his professional life – shoe designer, world rally driver, X games competitor, designer of EPIC cars and YouTube sensation. 

Credit: hemmings.com

Early Years 

You may know Ken Block from watching the WRC, the Dirt franchise of video games or the incredible Gymkhana videos – but Ken Block actually started out in life wanting to be a skateboarder – growing up in Long Beach, California. But once his family moved to San Diego or the ‘middle of nowhere’ as he called it, he started to mess around with dirt bikes. This would start his obsession with extreme sports that would define his life.  

He was always a fan of rallying. As a teenager he would catch up with the WRC at any chance he would get, which was tricky as it wasn’t televised in the U.S. back then – something Ken would later change. The jumps, the dirt, the guts of the drivers, and seeing normal cars being pushed to the limit absolutely captivated him and most importantly they made him think he could one day do the same. That was something he never felt categories like Formula 1 could do. 

Just as millions around the world see Ken there was one particular driver that inspired him, Colin McRae. You can see Colin in the way that Ken Block would approach anything he did, foot to the floor and always dialing it up to 11. They would actually later on become good friends, sharing a pure enjoyment of the car itself and for having fun with cars.  

Career 

With Ken, this incredible spirit wasn’t just with driving it was in all his other pursuits as well. Before all of the racing and fame, in 1994 Ken co-founded a shoe company with his friends Damon Way and Clayton Blem. They wanted to create a shoe for skateboarders that just wasn’t available at the time. Together they created DC Shoes, they would go on to be a massive success with Ken at the heart of it all. 

The clever advertising strategies that Ken helped to create aligned them with Pro athletes. They would sponsor these athletes and celebrate them in their advertisements. These were people that other people aspired to be like and a way to do this was to wear DC Shoes. This would be how Ken would meet a lifelong friend and collaborator, motocross legend Travis Pastrana. 

DC Shoes ended up being so popular by 2004 they weren’t just for skateboarders, and they were generating over $100,000,000 in revenue each year. This attracted the attention of Quik Sliver, who bought the company for $87,000,000 and made Ken a rich man. 

Racing 

After that of course Ken Block didn’t sit back and relax. He decided that at the age of 37, without any competitive experience, he was going to become a rally driver. Something he had always dreamed of since Colin McRae captured his imagination.  

Ken set his target high, he wanted to race with his friend Travis Pastrana. Unsurprisingly he would achieve his aim of racing with Travis when he convinced Subaru to let him drive their iconic Impreza WRX STI in Rally America in 2005. Luckily for Ken he felt at home immediately. He finished an incredible 7th in his first ever event, which was a 126-mile snow-covered stage surprising many with his natural talent. He would go on to win Rally America rookie of the year as well. This would also impress Subaru, who would keep on providing him with cars until 2010. Sponsoring Ken and Travis in what became known as Subaru Rally Team USA. While Ken would keep on driving in that competition until 2014, it was Travis that would take 4 consecutive titles between 2006 and 2009. 

Another event that would define his career was the X-Games. The most extreme sports competition in the world. Ken would compete in 9 of them taking 5 medals home with him in the rally car event. But the 2007 competition would have topped of the others, he would race and beat his hero Colin McRae in the X-Games 13 in the rally car special pushing the Scotsman into a flip in the process.  

Ken would compete in rallying until 2018 making it all the way to the WRC, the pinnacle of the sport, not bad for someone who didn’t start racing until they were in their late thirties. It should be noted that most professional drivers start at a very young age. This goes to show Ken’s natural talent. During his time in the WRC, he would become only the 4th American in history to score points. And fun fact more Americans have been to the moon than that. In the process, his wider profile brought the sport into the mainstream attracting new American fans to the sport and created a new generation of rally fans. 

Ken didn’t just take part in World rallying, like everything else in his life if he was going to do it then he was going to right. So, in 2010 he left Subaru and joined forces with Ford and founded the Monster World Rally team driving their Ford Fiesta rs-wrc. His team would compete in the WRC and World rallycross championship scoring points, podiums, and wins until Ken would hang up his gloves in 2018. Though he would race in the ARA (the American Rally Association) with Travis Pastrana up until present day. In the 2021 championship, he lost the overall victory by just 9 tenths of a second. 

Hoonigan 

Meanwhile, like his days at DC Shoes, Ken would use his shrewd marketing brain to push the boundaries of motorsport marketing. He would change the team’s name to Hoonigan Racing Division to match his newly founded YouTube channel. This was because of the success of a series of videos that Ken had produced to satisfy an itch, the same itch that he shared with Colin McRae, just to have fun with a car and to test it to its limits without the restraints of competition. To express his passion in his own way, this became Ken Block’s Gymkhana (pronounced jim-kah-nuh). 

In 2008, Ken Block posted a video on the Ken Block racing YouTube channel titled “DC SHOES: Ken Block Gymkhana Practice”. This video showed Ken blasting his 530 horsepower Subaru Impreza around an abandoned airfield in California. Its 4 minutes of high-octane drifting, donuts, and close calls with all sorts of obstacles including a man on a segway all strung together with seemingly effortless precision. And of course, this video went viral with over 16 million views, but this was only the beginning. 

Ken would go on to create a new genre of online video content which carved his name into motorsport and internet legends. Over the next 14 years and across 5 YouTube channels Ken would release 11 more Gymkhana, 2 Climbkhana, and 1 Electrikhana videos, sometimes sharing the wheel with his old friend Travis Pastrana. These videos would amass over 637 million views and send Ken and his friends all over the world to some of the biggest cities and most dangerous roads. It also led to some epic cars, and I definitely have a favorite. The shear production of these videos was crazy, Ken and his team shut down areas of at least 4 cities if not more. They even had an argument with the Australian government about what they were allowed to do in Sydney for Gymkhana 9. And this led to them scraping the project and instead filmed in Buffalo.  

Cars 

Credit: topgear.com

Ken had quite the garage at his disposal and there was one that really stood out to me. He started using the Subaru Impreza WRX for his Gymkhana’s. But as his partnerships changed and moved to the Ford Fiesta a WRC car that Block labeled the hybrid function Hoon vehicle. These two cars with their distinctive black, white, and fluorescent green livery looked so cool being blasted around sideways in his early videos.  

But these are not quite as cool as some of his crazier creations, as everyone has their favorite mine being the Hoonicorn, it is a completely custom car from the ground up with a modified ‘65 Mustang body on top, in its final form the incredible 1400 horsepower monster had a 6.7-liter twin turbocharged V8 engine. It featured a 6-speed manual transmission, 4-wheel drive, and could hit 60mph in 1.8 seconds. One of my favorite showcases of the car is when he raced the car up Pikes Peak, the most dangerous Hillclimb mountain in the world. 

Concluding 

A couple of weeks ago, on January 2nd, 2023, Ken sadly passed away in a horrific accident whilst riding around on a snowmobile on his ranch in Utah. The Motorsport world lost a true Trailblazer, an inspiration to motor heads and content creators alike. Ken Block lived an amazing life, inspiring and encouraging many younger people to get involved with cars or even people who already had the motoring bug. He really embodied the type of person that many would look up to too. Ken not only inspired and influenced people but also influenced culture, he made action sports what they are as well as bridged the gap between that content creation and the motorsports world.  

I am a massive Ken Block fan and will miss him and what he did. He’s left an incredible legacy in Motorsport and on YouTube, so go back and watch some of his greatest rallying and drifting moments. I would like to send my condolences to Ken blocks family and friends as we all mourn a Legend.