Ken Block Built the Hoonitruck as a Tribute to His Dad's Old F-150

Ken Block's Gymkhana films ran on spectacle for a decade, but the Hoonitruck's starting point wasn't spectacle at all. Block specifically chose a 1977 Ford F-150 because it was the same model his father owned when Block was a teenager first messing around behind the wheel — a detail that never shows up in the drift footage but shaped the entire project before Detroit Speed Inc. in Mooresville, North Carolina, ever cut a single piece of the build.

What Detroit Speed built around that starting point has almost nothing left in common with a stock F-150 beyond the silhouette. Power comes from a 3.5-liter twin-turbo EcoBoost V6 derived directly from the engine architecture in Ford's Le Mans-winning GT race program, running Garrett GTX3071R Gen II turbochargers and producing 914 to 917 horsepower and 702 lb-ft of torque. That output goes through a Sadev SC-90 six-speed sequential gearbox to a genuine all-wheel-drive system — a serious departure from the rear-drive layout of Block's earlier Gymkhana cars, built specifically to handle the truck's size and weight through tight, high-speed transitions.

The build was also engineered to travel. Detroit Speed designed it modularly so the whole truck can be broken down for shipping and reassembled on location, which mattered given where it ended up being driven — debuting in Gymkhana Ten before later climbing China's Tianmen Mountain switchbacks in Climbkhana Two, a run that demanded a completely different kind of control than a closed parking lot. Reported build costs ran past $1.5 million, a number that tracks with a bespoke chassis, a race-derived engine, and a sequential gearbox all built into a shape that started life as a decades-old work truck.

Block died in a snowmobile accident in January 2023, which makes the personal detail behind the Hoonitruck land differently in hindsight than it did at the build's 2018 debut. It was always the loudest, most technically extreme machine in his garage — and it was also, quietly, the one built in the shape of his father's old truck.