RideLust

If you’re thing is whipping through the woods at 100 + mph with death doling trees on both sides of you, well then, have I got a treat for you! You see set before you are all the best highlights from the 2011 WRC rally season, and when I tell you these are simply outstanding, I’m not lying. We’ve got snow, tarmac, gravel, dirt and crashes that will make you wish you had a roll cage strapped to your chair. In short this video is bad-ass, so sit back, grab a beer, click through and enjoy the highlights of the craziest motorsport of them all.

Source: Youtube.com

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Though it can be a little hard to see the road ahead, this GoPro helmet cam footage of Ken Block shaking down the Monster Energy Ford Fiesta RS WRC ahead of Rally Germany is impressive. It gives you an idea of how explosively quick pro rally cars have gotten (again), and it shows you just how puckering driving a narrow country road at triple digit speeds can be. Read More…

If you’re counting down the days until the release of Ken Block’s Gymkhana Four, you’ve only got four more days to go. Gymkhana Four, starring Ken Block and his Hybrid Function Hoon Vehicle (HFHV), will hit You Tube on Tuesday, August 16. We hope it’s not a DC shoes sales pitch, thinly disguised as a hip-hop video, but the trailer below seems to indicate that it’s the real deal. Read More…

The video below is about three minutes long, but it’s really about the 10 second crash that Block and co-driver Alex Gelsomino had in Portugal. I think I know what they were trying to do here, but only because I very nearly stacked a race in a similar fashion once. My crash (or near-crash, since I didn’t actually roll the car) couldn’t have lasted more than fifteen seconds, but the time spent sliding across the infield dirt, on two wheels, was the longest ten minutes of my life. I can still play it back in astonishing detail, and I clearly remember taking my hands off the wheel (since broken thumbs suck), shutting off the fuel pump and oil system and getting ready to hit the release on my harness. If that’s what Block, or more specifically, Monster World Rally, was going for here I’d say they nailed it. Except for the whole swimming underwater in Nomex thing, which I’d just write off as art. Enjoy.

As years go, 2011 hasn’t started off on the best note for me. Compared to Ken Block, however, I can’t complain: he hasn’t fared well in any single WRC event run to date, and had a massive crash in Portugal that destroyed the Monster World Rally Ford Fiesta in the pre-race shakedown stage. He’s got some downtime in April since his wife is due to “pop out (their) 3rd kid”, but he’s back to his usual balls out schedule in May. His next WRC event is the Rally of Argentina on May 26, but don’t expect Block to be idle until then, since there’s plenty of testing and tuning to do. He’d tell you what his schedule is himself, but it’s still not finalized for the remainder of 2011. Despite suffering a 16 g crash just days before the interview below, Block seems none the worse for wear and we wish him all the best for the rest of the season. Read More…

Ken Block logs some flight time. Image: RallyMania

Go big or go home could be Ken Block’s personal trademark. The Rally / Gymkhana / X-Games driver was shaking down his Ford Fiesta WRC car, in preparation for this weekend’s Rally of Portugal, when he experienced a “fourth gear incident”. In other words, Block was hammer down when he lost control, rolling the car five times and sending both himself and co-driver Alex Gelsomino to a local hospital for evaluation. The good news is that the pair were uninjured in the spectacular crash; the bad news is their car was a write-off, at least for this weekend’s event. Both Block and Gelsomino are back in the U.S., where they will begin preparation for the upcoming Rally Argentina, scheduled for May 26 to 29. Read More…

Image: RM Auctions

Sometimes I really, really hate the internet. It takes a lot of surfing to find stories that are worth posting, since nobody wants to read a site that just re-hashes manufacturer’s press releases. Sometimes you stumble across something that you shouldn’t, simply because it will create an unrelenting desire to sell everything you own and buy it. Take, for example, this 1986 Ford RS200 Evo, found on Bring A Trailer, that will be sold at the RM Auctions Amelia Island event. To say I want this car is perhaps the biggest understatement in written history; I, in fact yearn for this car in a most illogical and unhealthy manner. Read More…

Image: Monster World Rally Team

The WRC season kicks off this weekend with Rally Sweden, and here’s two minutes of Ken Block trying to keep his Ford Fiesta WRC car pointed in roughly the right direction during shake down testing. Despite studded tires and AWD, Block seems to spend a surprising amount of time sideways, scrubbing off speed. It looks like the new Ford Fiesta may prove even more challenging to drive than last year’s WRC Ford Focus. Block knows what he needs to do to improve in 2011, and a lot of that is dependent upon creating better pace notes with his co-driver, Alex Gelsomino. More below. Read More…

Ken Block may just be the hardest working man in show business. For 2011, he’s piloting the Ford Fiesta WRC car you see above in Sweden, Mexico, Portugal, Argentina, Germany, Australia, France, Spain and Britain. In between, he’s running select Rally of the Americas and RallyCross events, launching a “Gymkhana World Tour” in Los Angeles, Australia and Austria, and competing in the Summer X Games. In his downtime, he’ll film Gymkhana Four and Gymkhana Grid, visit the Goodwood Festival of Speed (again), attend the Weston Festival of Transport and drop in on the Monza Rally Show. Just for fun, he’ll be working on three other, top-secret project and hanging out with scantily-clad blonds. It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it. Video below. Read More…

We here at RideLust had a fairly epic 2010: I got track time with the last of the Dodge Viper Coupes, the Shelby GT500 and the Cadillac CTS-V Sedan and Coupe. Mike raced One Lap Of America, 24 Hours of Lemons and got to star in a BMW video alongside people like Buzz Aldrin. Mike and I drove the new Chevy Volt from NYC to Detroit, and we both got to drive a boatload of new cars throughout the year. As cool as all that was, it pales in comparison to the year that Ken Block had. Read More…