Building Block: Making A LEGO Tribute to Ken Block
/Best of BrickNerd —Article originally published May 24, 2021 and republished today in honor of Ken Block who died earlier this week in a snowmobile accident.
For a car nerd, meeting Ken Block was a big deal. And when he has a name like that, what else could I do but build a LEGO tribute to the stunt-driving legend?
One legendary YouTube superstar and one star-struck LEGO fan. Guess who is who?
I’ve always been crazy about cars. One of the first words I uttered, was ‘bil’ (‘car’ in Norwegian). I drew cars in all my notebooks at school. I built cars out of LEGO. I’ve subscribed to probably ten different car magazines. I got my drivers’ licence after a crash course (not literally) right after my 18th birthday, bought my first car shortly thereafter, and as soon as I got a job and had enough money to go after not simply the most sensible of the cheapest options, I bought something a bit more exotic (and much less reliable, but that’s another story):
If you have a bit of car knowledge, you may have spotted a pattern here, the pattern of il tricolore (hence the ‘less reliable’ description), with the exception of the Mini (which turned out to be just as unreliable). My current daily driver, though, is an electric Kia, brought about by the fact that I got married—and I’m very happy about that—so I can absolutely live with having a slightly less exciting, and much more reliable car!
Anyway, I digress, like I normally do when I talk about cars. I have never owned an American car—unlike many Norwegians, I’ve never been particularly interested in those—but being a petrolhead (gearhead, to you Americans) I certainly haven’t been able to miss the shenanigans of a certain Ken Block.
Ken Block
You may or may not know who this is, but the short story is that Ken Block co-founded DC Shoes in 1994. That became a huge success story, Block became quite wealthy, and after having sold off his shares in the company he shifted his focus to Hoonigan Industries, an apparel brand for car people. He’s also done a fair bit of rallying (the kind of racing that features time trial stages on public roads that have been closed off for the occasion) in the WRC (World Rally Championship) and rallycross (similar, but driving laps against other drivers on closed circuits) in the WRX (World Rallycross Championship).
What he’s arguably most famous for, though, is his Gymkhana videos, where he does crazy driving stunts, filmed and edited by some of the very best people in the business—and the results are nothing short of spectacular. The first one was posted on YouTube in November 2008 and since then, nine more have been made. For some reason, number eight—where Block goes crazy in Dubai—has now been removed from YouTube and is only available on Facebook. But at the time of writing, the other nine have been watched a staggering 469,383,697 times in total. If we include all the spinoff videos, the number is easily more than half a billion views. I think that counts as being influential.
Here’s my favourite, accounting for more than 100 million views alone: Gymkhana Five, where he tears up the streets of San Francisco in his little Ford Fiesta.
See what I mean? Even if you have no interest in cars, you can surely appreciate that there is some serious skill involved, and the production values are through the roof (and so is probably the budget). Plus, it takes place in one of my favourite cities in the world!
But How Did I Meet Him?
Funny you should ask! You’re reading a LEGO blog and probably wondering when I’m going to get to the point… sorry about that.
I work as a TV sports reporter for a living. I’ve also done a fair bit of presenting for my network, TV 2 Norway, and over the years I have, of course, met a famous sportsperson or two. A few years ago Andreas Bakkerud, a local motorsport talent from Bergen, where I live and TV 2 is located, managed to get into the World Rallycross Championship. For his third year, he switched teams and ended up… yup, you guessed it, at the Hoonigan Racing Division, partnering none other but Ken Block himself.
andreas bakkerud and i during a sports broadcast at tv 2’s 24-hour news channel, TV 2 nyhetskanalen
I’ve got to know Andreas a bit, and needless to say, he got to know Ken Block quite well, so during the successful first season where Andreas finished third in the championship, his teammate actually came to Norway on holiday with his family. He also set aside a day for meeting fans, and I knew I had to go.
bricklink part 59349pb235, Panel 1 x 6 x 5 with black “Ken Block” signature and number 43 pattern (nah, just kidding)
The encounter itself was nice—Andreas introduced me, Ken shook my hand, listened to what I had to say and allowed me to get the picture you saw at the top of this article, and that was pretty much it. After all, there were many other starstruck people who had come to get a few seconds of his time. But before he got the chance to turn around and leave (here comes the LEGO bit!), I pulled out a white panel 1 x 6 x 5 and said “uh, excuse me… would you be so kind as to sign this for me?”
He gave me a weird look, but obliged and signed the LEGO part with his name and his signature ‘43’ race car number, before continuing his holiday, maybe plotting out which crazy winding Norwegian mountain road to bring one of his cars to next. (May I suggest the famous Trollstigen, Ken?)
Building Block
You see, there was a point in me bringing that LEGO panel to the encounter. I build the occasional LEGO building and a vignette now and then, but what I mainly use my bricks for is building cars. So I wanted to build a car as a tribute to Ken Block, and I had set my sights on the one that is arguably his most famous one: the Hoonicorn. First featured in Gymkhana Seven which ends with a fantastic sprint up to the iconic Hollywood sign, the Hoonicorn is a 1965 Ford Mustang that has undergone a complete rebuild to end up as a 1,400 horsepower drift monster.
Of all the cars Block has driven in his videos over the past twelve years, this is the one that lends itself best to being recreated in LEGO bricks, because it is, well… so blocky. When building my version I sat down at my computer as I normally do, and started out in MLCad, a free LEGO building program that uses the LDraw database. After some trial and error I came up with something I was reasonably happy with:
my block-y hoonicorn, as viewed in the ldview program.
I went for a Speed Champions-esque style, which at the time meant a six-stud wide design. While it’s not the smoothest LEGO car I’ve pulled off, nor the best LEGO Mustang I’ve seen, it does a reasonable impression of the real thing. It does, however, completely lack decals while the original is full of them. So I looked through my sticker collection and found a few official LEGO stickers that could work, but for the proper Monster Energy and Hoonigan decals, I had to resort to eBay.
I couldn’t find any number 43 stickers in the right size though, so for decorating the sides of the car I actually took an all-white part of a LEGO sticker sheet and carefully cut out the pattern with a sharp knife, and repeated it for the other side. The final product ended up looking like this:
It’s a nice mix between official LEGO stickers, a couple of sheets I found on eBay, and custom-cut self-made ones. The Monster sticker on the roof actually even improved the structural rigidity a bit, which was a nice added bonus, even though I pride myself on avoiding weak connections when I build…
You may have noticed the lovely shiny bits. I knew I needed some copper to recreate the look of the original, and LEGO doesn’t do that colour, so I placed an order at the online shop of my go-to guy for chrome parts, Auri at Chrome Block City. I also added a few metallic silver parts, for the sidepipe surrounds, the rear filler cap and the roll bar.
The build was far from finished, though, for one particular reason: I still didn’t have anywhere to put the signed panel! So I went online and found a few pictures of the Hoonicorn from the 2014 SEMA show in Las Vegas where it was parked in a booth that had some nice details.
the hoonicorn at the 2014 sema show in las vegas. photo via autoblog.com
I recreated that floor pattern using tiles in two shades of yellow and two (not 50) shades of gray, added a blue door and a wall clock, and noticed that the support in the corner looked eerily similar to a LEGO part, the rather intricately named “Support 2 x 2 x 10 Girder Triangular Vertical - Type 3 - 3 Posts, 2 Sections” on BrickLink, so I put one of those in each corner.
Then I took some artistic licence and added a microphone stand and some speakers, a helmet on display, a table with refreshments, a lovely giant trophy, and a display sign with a picture of the real Hoonicorn. Topping everything off is some additional stickerwork and, of course, the pièce de resistence, the signed panel. Adding Mr. Block himself to the whole display (and a PR manager, there must always be a PR manager present!), I put the Hoonicorn where it belonged and snapped some pictures.
Since finishing it, I have added one final touch, which makes a whole lot of difference when displaying this piece at conventions—namely lights. I stick with Brickstuff for that—it’s a family business run by a lovely guy called Rob, and they make tiny little lights with ultra-thin wires that are perfect for retrofitting models. In this case, a lot of the wires run through the grooves between the floor tiles. The whole model looks so much better with a total of sixteen tiny Pico LEDs added:
And that’s the story of how I built Ken Block a tribute worthy of his last name.
Approval!
Well… not the whole story. I am human, like the rest of you, so to a certain extent I crave recognition when I do something that I’m happy with. So obviously I sent the link to my Flickr album to Andreas.
You can read the message exchange to the right. Or, in the unlikely case that you don’t understand Norwegian, I’ll translate it for you:
“You’ve seen the original, I suppose?”
“I haven’t seen that picture, but that’s really cool. I showed it to Ken, too, and he thinks it’s really cool (and so do I).”
“Haha, nice! Give my regards :)”
Final Remarks
I did actually submit the Hoonicorn to LEGO Ideas! Considering the number of views on his videos I know Ken Block has a huge fan base, so I figured it could have a good chance of reaching 10,000 supporters. Sadly, it was rejected before it was even listed because it conflicted with existing IP rights—they didn’t tell me which, but it probably had something to do with the then-unreleased Speed Champions Mustang.
That means that, for now at least, there is only one of these models in existence. But let me finish by saying this: If you ever read this, Ken, and realise that you’d fancy a copy on your shelf, I will happily build you a second one. Then you’ll only have to come to Norway and get it… and while you’re here, why not shoot one of those fancy videos of yours? I’ve mentioned Trollstigen… but there’s also Lysevegen… or Stalheimskleiva… just sayin’…
Have you ever met a celebrity and decided to build them a LEGO tribute? Or even managed to show it to them? Let us know in the comments!
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