Ken Block’s Lasting Racing Legacy
If your first real exposure to Ken Block was his collaboration with Codemasters for Colin McRae Dirt 2, released on PC and seventh-generation consoles way back in 2009, you may not have known what to make of him at the time. Pitched as the new face of the franchise in the early promotional materials, Block cut a drastically different figure on screen to the late Colin McRae. McRae had a famous reputation as a madman behind the wheel, but outside of a rally car the Scot always appeared calm, natural, and low-key. Perched behind a set of sunglasses indoors and flanked by Monster Energy models, Block certainly seemed like a contrasting character; a hot dog hand grenade set to blow up Codemasters’ conventions. Scotland’s South Lanarkshire was making way for the Spring Break swagger of Long Beach, California, and Block was clearly being positioned as a core part of Dirt 2’s pivot to a considerably more US-centric, X Games-inspired take on rally racing.
Of course, the sideways shift from a strict focus on traditional rallying was a natural move at the time. Rallying was building steam in the US, and even Colin McRae himself had then-recently been established as a genuine X Games star following his famous duel with extreme sports berserker Travis Pastrana in 2006. McRae and Pastrana had dominated the debut of Rally Car Racing at X Games 12, and McRae looked set to pinch the gold in the final event. That is, until spectacularly rolling his Impreza on the final jump in front of a packed stadium, landing upright in a cloud of dirt, and furiously flooring it over the finish line and securing the second-place silver medal. That Codemasters took notice of his exploits here is a given.
Still, while there’s no doubt McRae’s tragic
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