A driving force of online car culture

The Petersen Museum salutes rally driver and video pioneer Ken Block

Rally car and exhibition driver Ken Block, who died in 2023, is credited with expanding interest in car culture online through his “Gymkhana” series of slickly produced driving videos stuffed with eye-popping stunts. courtesy of petersen automotive museum

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By Richard Guzman

riguzman@scng.com

He was an action sports icon, a social media star and one of the world’s most famous rally car drivers, and now the late Ken Block is being honored by the Petersen Automotive Museum with a new exhibit titled “People’s Champ: The Impact of Ken Block.”

“We’re celebrating his position as a pillar and a center of automotive culture,” said Michael McCardle, a curator for the museum.

Born in Long Beach, Block co-founded Huntington Beach-based skateboard and action sports brand DC Shoes in 1994. After selling the company, Block became a rally car driver at age 38. He quickly became a star, winning several X Games medals and racing in the World Rally Championship with the Hoonigan Racing Division, which he also founded. Block died in a snowmobile accident in 2023.

The exhibit opens Saturday and centers on custom vehicles including a Mustang, a Porsche and even a couple of Ford Escorts that were featured in his online series of sleek videos called “Gymkhana,” where he showed off his considerable stunt driving skills in various environments. The videos brought more than 2 million subscribers to his YouTube channel.

“He had over a billion views and he was really a pioneer of automotive culture online,” McCardle said. “They are purely an exhibition of rally style driving taken to its most extreme; doing doughnuts in incredibly tight spaces, doing slides where the back of the car is hanging centimeters from an edge. It was just this fantastic visual spectacle and some of the most skillful driving anyone has ever seen, with fantastic cinematography to match,” he added.

The exhibit will feature cars like a 1965 Ford Mustang dubbed the Hoonicorn, which was in several of his films, as well as a 1,400-horsepower 2022 Porsche 911 he named Hoonipigasus and a 1978 Ford Escort, his first Ford rally car. It will also include memorabilia like racing suits, helmets, wheels, DC shoes and Hoonigan merchandise.

“We want to celebrate his accomplishments as a race car driver and building this series that’s so beloved by auto enthusiasts, but really the through line of this whole thing is highlighting the impact he had on the culture,” McCardle said.