What Ken Block Meant to Us All

What Ken Block Meant to Us AllMassimo Bettiol

You don’t have to have known Ken Block personally to have known Ken Block. All you needed was to have seen the incredible videos he and his Hoonigan team created, or understood that when he went racing, he had one of two results: win or crash. If you then wanted to go out in your own car and spin round and round, go sideways, make outrageous clouds of tire smoke and do burnouts until the wheels fall off — then you got Ken Block.

Quiet, thoughtful, and somewhat of an introvert, Ken spoke with his hands, feet, heart, and cojones, all strapped to creatively aggressive thousand-horsepower builds, which he sent sideways through buildings, or flying through fire.

Ken’s first career was impressive enough, co-founding DC shoes and cashing out for nine figures — enough for a sane person to exit stage left for a yacht in the Caribbean. But Ken’s second career is how he truly made his mark on the world, and why we appreciate him today — and why were so stunned by his death. (No disrespect the other founders of shoe companies, but this is a car magazine.)

Seventeen years ago, Ken went rallying, and got hooked. Rallying is a true driver’s sport; rallisti who try other things almost always do well at them, and that rarely works the other way around. To be a great rally driver is to have a steady gaze, a heavy foot, quick hands, and the ability to think two steps ahead of your car, hurtling a hundred miles an hour, inches from an oak tree or the edge of a cliff. Ken had the goods, but that only wins you plastic trophies and hundreds of dollars in prize money.

In order to become a worldwide figure, to become the Ken we knew and loved, you needed more than the goods. You needed to be at the right place, at precisely the right time, with the right idea, and then, only then, if that idea hits, you need to go preternaturally hard at the throttle. He did all that, and thus was born the legend of #43.

Ken didn’t invent Gymkhana. The term wasn’t even coined in reference to cars. It originates with horses and goes all the way back to Genghis Khan. But I’d put big money that nearly every Road & Track reader’s first experience with the term was somehow related to Ken Block. The first video “DC Shoes: Ken Block Gymkhana Practice” dropped on November 11, 2008, in the very early days of YouTube, and now has over 16.5 million views. Charmingly basic, raw, and unproduced by today’s over-the-top standards, it stopped all of us in our tracks, and instantly set a course for not just Ken, but the entire car video landscape. What exactly was he practicing for? Is this a real sport? Is he trying to kill this car? Are all Subarus this cool?

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At the time, I was working at a place called Next New Networks making a little car show called Garage419. JF Musial, Mike Spinelli, and I watched the four and a half minute video on repeat, all day. The gnash of a Crawford Boxer engine, the death-squeal of killing four tires a minute for four straight minutes, and the iconic shot of Ken doing donuts around the director riding a moving Segway are still seared in my brain. There’s no music, only engine noise and tires melting. I had seen a lot of Top Gear, but somehow, this video was the most exciting driving ever captured on film. Through the whole video, Ken doesn’t speak; Ken doesn’t even smile; Ken doesn’t show any actual human emotion at all, even though doing those moves in an overpowered Subaru must have been fun. He let it all out through the car, not from his mouth. He looked like a driving robot inside a machine, but he was actually an artist.

The Gymkhana 2 sequel more than tripled that view count and created a legend. He channeled the energy and flow of skateboarding with the sounds, smells, and visuals of home-brew tuner culture, smashed it into the X-Games “I invented a new sport” vibe, and all at the perfect “video or it didn’t happen” time in human history. It wasn’t for the plastic trophy — it was for the lulz.

That was the start, but Ken’s magic was in his drive — paired with the guiding hands of producer / director extraordinaire Brian Scotto — to top himself again and again for fourteen years. Jump a car onto a floating barge? No problem. Slide a car off the edge of Pikes Peak and recover? Done. Shut down one of LA’s busiest freeways to do legal, permitted donuts while the rest of us plebs waited? Yep, that too. Blow off a set of tires inside a Las Vegas casino? Did that just last month. He was always on top of not only the latest car trend — AWD hatchback rally cars, extreme pro-touring builds, resto-modded Porsches, and most recently, an electrified, retro-future Audi Sport Quattro — but also on top of the latest in cameras and techniques; always finding ways to integrate the latest filming trick into his newest video.

Ken always managed to do the ultimate hoon move, in the ultimate hard-to-get location, captured in the most iconic way. I remember that the first time I saw a DSLR “array” set up to do a John Woo / Matrix style “bullet dodge” shot, it was in Gymkhana. It took Top Gear a year to use the same technique. He had the best in the business chasing him.

But then he’d bring you and your non-mainstream idea of car culture right in. Lowriders, donks, hoopties, Segways, ATVs, lead sleds, and bro-dozers made cameos in Gymkhana videos, always with a respect to the culture, never with shade. Culturally, Hoonigan Industries was one of the most multicultural car-based entities around, welcoming to anyone willing to send it, no matter what they looked like, who they loved, or what their pronouns were.

Though Ken never sought attention outside of his racing suit, he was big enough for it to find him. He always made the time for people, whether they were fans, media outlets big or small, or young drivers seeking advice. I only met him on a handful of occasions, but he was always engaging, always ready to chat about the latest race or excited about his newest build, and always ready for the next adventure.

He briefly tried to be a car collector, acquiring an Escort Cosworth and the ultimate rally machine: the Ford RS200. But collecting didn’t take, maybe because Ken didn’t even really care that much about cars. He cared about driving as hard as possible every chance he got. And that mentality doesn’t jive with collecting cars, so he sold the RS200 and never looked back. For him it was about the dance, the show. He didn’t want to add resale value into the equation.

And though the end product may seem like silly fun, Ken knew how to get the best out of himself and his cars: practice and hard work. All the money in the world won’t make you great if you don’t put in the work, and he put an insane amount of work, and travel, and dedication into his craft.

Over the years, other drivers in their own purpose-built stunt cars put out their own videos with their own takes on the Gymkhana theme, convinced they could improve on Ken’s formula. None ever quite matched the magic of the original.

As he got more successful, the opportunities came to him. He even drove in the World Rally Championship. But Ken Block never forgot his roots, and always returned to them. He was a rich gentleman racer, but he didn’t act like it, and he certainly didn’t hang out with other rich gentleman racers — in IMSA or at Ferrari Challenge paddocks. He hung out with flat bill drifters in Long Beach and Compton, on a thankless, fan-less rally stage in the woods, or in remote snowy lodges on the side of mountains with a board strapped to his feet and a GoPro on his chest. He created celebrities out of people who just wanted to do dumb shit in their cars, and led the most successful automotive lifestyle clothing brand of the last 20 years. I recently spoke at a career day at a high school in East Los Angeles, and was flabbergasted at the amount of Hoonigan merch worn by the student body. And these kids didn’t just wear the shirt, they believed in the message.

Massimo Bettiol

The full impact of Ken’s influence on car media has yet to be realized, and it’s incredibly sad that he won’t be around to see where it goes in the next few decades, when the young people he inspired grow up to become drivers and filmmakers. The announcement of Ken’s death only went up about a few hours ago, and every single content creator I have ever met, worked with, or heard about is flooding social media with their memories of him. His positive impact on the current car media landscape is 100 percent, because he did exactly the thing he wanted to be doing every single day for the last seventeen years.

We should all be so lucky. Godspeed, 43. You were it.

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