Ken Block’s NEW Fox-Body Ford Mustang Gymkhana Car Concept: The Hoonifox

[Music] all right so today we've got a special episode where we're kind of showing behind the scenes we normally don't do this we normally build things and then we reveal them in a really big way in a real-life way but it's crazy times with everything going on with lockdowns and Cova 19 so Ken's gonna let us in a little bit on a special project that he's been working on with our man ash Thorpe so what's up guys hi Bryan oh what's up dudes what have you guys been up to I mean we kind of know what Kenz what up to he talks about it every day what have you been up to just working a lot and trying to keep busy trying to keep focused I've been learning a lot of new stuff so yeah just trying to stay positive and just focus on the good things we have and feel blessed and keep working so you just omitted probably the biggest thing that you had worked on this year cuz I guess it's probably in the past but for all of us it's it's new news so yeah word on the street is you are involved actually or have designed the new Batmobile yeah well do two really gnarly NDA's and all that kind of stuff I can't say specifically or give any specifics but yes I definitely involved with the design creation of the latest edition of the Batmobile so guys if you don't know Ashe designed the Cosworth for us we've been working with ash for the past couple years putting a bunch of stuff together Ash's a bonafide car guy but has also done a bunch of other cool stuff and a lot of it in Hollywood the Kazi version too for us you applied delivery and made all the launch stuff for us for the 2020 livery but in that whole time now you've done a bunch of other stuff too the dam again like a great hack right what else have you done I know you had your own personal project that you did also yeah I mean I'm always being I'm always busy and just like the film industry like I'm always working on either another video game or a movie and so a lot of my work you don't really see it until like it's gone through its span to release so most of the stuff that I'm working on or have been working on since we've been we've been working together it's still kind of hidden so unfortunately but I'm always kind of working on my own passion projects as excuses to learn and stuff and I've been building a bunch of cars and I got this really crazy old cars like build them in CG sorry yeah piece of I'm actually designing them but I treat it almost as if I'm really building it though cuz that helps my mind process because if I if I don't treat it like that then I don't really take responsibility for the certain ways that I like to design it so but yeah it's there's been a lot of stuff the great hack was really awesome and we it's such an important film and we got a ton of awards for our work on that and that was a really rewarding project is the first documentary I had been a part of and went to Sundance actually and went is out in your in your town and that was really beautiful and it's my first time in Sundance and it had such a big impact but yeah and I've been just as designing other cars and I got this really crazy Corvette that I'm working on right now and possibly the guys that fast and loud Richard Rawlings and them are thinking about possibly building it so there's just a lot of really cool stuff so just constantly staying busy and yeah and there's an endless amount of possibilities the more skills you get in this realm because it's it's so vast so you can do anything inside the CGI world so let's get into the new project right so this is something that I mean we've been talking about Ken for a really long time like why don't you give us a little background on the inspiration for how this project started well part of the inspiration is just the Unicorn like I like all of us especially me loved the Unicorn not only as a project that we were able to build and to have a lot of success with not only like the satisfaction of making such a cool car but taking a risk in making something that had never been done before them all wheel drive perform Mustang so the idea of doing that but repeating it with various models of Mustangs is the basic concept and for me the most obvious of that was the Fox body but but back to the unicorn now I love the style of it I love the simplicity of it I loved the v8 I especially loved the original v8 and not that I don't love the twin-turbo it just already feels like it's trying to kill me you know even the idea of going back to the just the simple rawness at the beginning of the unicorn maybe even making it more simple draw that was kind of the general idea that I had in my head of what I wanted to do and so the Fox Body came up as kind of the next obvious choice um but also the 80s like I love the 80s and so the Fox body with the louvers and that sort of look just really means 80s to me in the for context so then I answered we go ooh Miami Vice like doing a Gymkhana in in Miami so an all-white like the all-white Countach is kind of like my inspiration white on white white interior all that stuff rolled into one so that's when I started with with ash here's my brain dump I wanted to do my everybody's but it's a Mustang and it's it's basically the Hoonah corn and alway bottle the Lots there's my brain dump but we have all dolled that into a certain inspirations of certain Fox Body race car and you know that we we had found on the Internet and kind of rolled all that up into an idea and I think Ashton's response was just hell yeah they actually synced up perfectly because you were like let's do a Fox Body I was like that's exactly what I was hoping you'd say because it's a car that I feel like has all the potential to just be insane so it was like that's my favorite thing is taking something that's kind of forgotten and like reimagine it you so not like it's forgotten but you know what I mean so yeah so Fox it was basically just a frame designator but so the actual name for Fox was inspired by something that warms my heart because it was the Audi Fox see Lee Iacocca was looking at how to build a platform for Ford that was more of a European based car and they looked at the Audi Fox is kind of bad inspiration and you know the Fox body is more than just the Mustang it's the mercury Capri it's the Ford Fairmont it is the Thunderbird there's a bunch of other cars that are built on what is known as kind of the Ford fox-body platform fox body it's a code name I mean a lot of manufacturers use kind of secret code names I think box body just sounded so cool that it was something that I kind of just stayed with the car and you know now people really know it as Fox Body when I when I build these things I'll grab references from from Ken Ken Ken and I usually we talk via text because we're both busy or in meetings or something so he'll send stuff I'll check it all I mean we'll send stuff back and forth and I'm like what do you think of this and what'd you think of that and so I was just pulling random references from current existing like race cars and Fox bodies that are really quite interesting just like we really there was a couple ingredients that I think we both knew that we really needed to have obviously a wide-body since we're gonna do the v8 with the ITV's having that big scoop in there and roof scoop as well and the rear window the levers or what do you call these the louvers that we call those movers and then like this one doesn't have it but like the covers on the rear lights and stuff to use just just certain things that are like super iconic about this and I was also wanting to explore different like you know are we going to use the state this stock lines and there's accentuate them are we gonna do like bubble flares or like how we're gonna approach the diffuser because we have the core car but then it's like how do we add the pieces and build up a new formula really so looking through this now I remember one of our biggest discussions was rear wing the there's a lot of different rear wings using styles put on that car and we didn't like any of them like per se exactly as they were done yeah you came up with the design that's on your finished design which is a bit of a mix of a couple different ones yeah it was mostly DTM inspired because like you I'm a massive fan of that because I think what we when we look at DTM race car as we go like it's full function and the brittleness of the functionality is what makes it so awesome so and it looks like it's something that performs and it's quite special that way so I think with the wing the for me the wing the importance of the wing is to to melt it's like the bass player in a band it's like connecting the guitar and the drums it connects four rear three quarters to the rear so it's another ratio blender basically so I wanted to make sure that we had something that would bond those two elements the car so that there was like a proper ratio for me it's all about the ratio like how is one thing feeding the other thing - so after the reference is its then kind of showing a little bit of kind of what I call the behind the scenes or this is probably the first picture I took of the project which is a stock model of the Ford yeah and look at this bad boy that's in all its glory yeah so usually what I like to do is I'll build out a base mesh and kind of get the form right make sure Ken's cool with it and then we go in and rebuild that and refine everything but these are like drawings that I would basically do over the geometry to be like okay this is the line that line needs to match there and that has to have that ratio and we need to match the molding and all these kind of things and they're just like quick right lines but they're reminders because when you get into 3d you kind of lose sense of proportions and stuff so it was really key to kind of constantly be reminded and as you go through the process you're constantly fighting that so usually what I would do is I would just take references from things that I really love so I took Ken's lunacorn and like these other race cars some Ferrari stuff some looks like that's like know what that is a beamed and that's a WRX or something member yes like a Hawkeye yeah but like just kind of drawing in like well how does the front mouth look and do we want it to smile or not all these different things in proportions and making sure things felt right looks right and these are just me taking pictures and like making notes of like the bumper line should come out this far and it's you're constantly looking at it there's so many different iterations until it actually reveals itself so even like this I was like ah this looks wonky and like trying to straighten these lines out and make sure that the proportions are right and this is like I think probably one of my favorite things on this design is is is those fender vents because they protrude out but they also have the design language and form of the rest of the car which is really cool too so alright how does this evolved into what ended up being the final design do you send me some wireframes do you want to start with those yeah well basically the look at the wireframes is so the wireframes that we're looking at now is the subdivided body so it's all the geometry divided within itself so that you have more geometry so that it catches the light properly so this is the final stage of the model so you can kind of see all of the little nuances and the details that are put into it and making sure we're matching in lines and stuff but this is at the end of the design and modeling process we're just kind of looking at the car completely done basically a model to every every where you see two lines meeting that's a vertice and that's that's a thing that you can adjust so yeah and where it's black it's like so dense you can't even see it so before you go to all the pretty stuff though don't you don't you look at the like clay version first definitely that's part of the process is seeing it like without any livery basically clean so it looks like a clay model that way we can really see what it looks like and if the lines are really working and stuff too if you're really critiquing a design of something seeing it in that sort of clay form with like really bouncing off it kind of sees it in its pure form [Music] the next stage is basically rendering and rendering is where like you actually unwrap the car and then you put liveries on it and put we call them shaders and CGI basically build like the principles of light when light rays bounce off the Sun or wherever lights emitting it touches the surface and then car paint there's all these different layers there's your clear coat and your main paint and if there's Fleck in there and if it's matte there's all these different properties and that has an i/o are basically it's a mathematical number that's attached to the way that light reacts to it I love this livery like this is one of the liveries Ashe has done one of many sets of things that will lit here real quick but this is as if we were to take like the current unicorn livery and put it on you know because we don't have time to explore all the sort of delivery options right now this is more about the car design so it's taking existing livery put it on so you know bronze wheels black on black livery and all the current sponsors so I did a couple different versions I did all all carbon version cuz who doesn't want to a carbon version right so I also just did like a crazy murdered-out one because I was thinking eventually I just love photography too so I figured huh this is how I would light that car if I was actually doing what that's the thing I love about this so you come up with a mental concept that's like black on black but dramatic black lighting and then you send me a Timah jizz that are all in Spain but like most any car guy would love to have a set of photos or one photo that's like this of their car and you just like like there's eight like at different angles from behind with light real dramatic or just part of the car and it's just insane like that you can do this stuff so fast so ash Mallory we're showing the whole car let's show my my Miami Vice dream so yeah let's definitely talk about what I call Road cocaine I guess I don't know I was thinking about it and I was like I can can we just do like a all white wine at the logos all black and white and then I was expecting like no you can't do that you know and then I think you were like let's try it are like he said you can never do this in real life because obviously your sponsors would not have be having it but but we're now in the virtual world launching a concept is fun to show everyone what we would love to do but in reality once once we hopefully build this car eventually yeah I don't have to have a standard you know logo type application on it back to like like finishing the idea of a Miami Vice Gymkhana this is the car this this is what I pictured my picture doing in 80's Gymkhana in Miami and a white on white car this is it like I we couldn't make this any better like ash killed it have we just inadvertently announced the next Gymkhana damn right yeah here's like I guess I would call this the Tony the Tiger version I don't know why but I mean I guess I know why but when we talked about doing a dry carbon with the logos inlaid and then graphic decals and gloss on top but yeah this was a lot of fun building this out and making the carbon fit and work and stuff is cool too basically the the decals to save weight the way I would think of it it was almost like it would be sublimated into the layer underneath the coating of the truck Arvind so yeah that's great so in this in this process that was we were going through all these liveries I said hey ash I want you to give us the liveries what what would your dream of a car this car with your own graphics on it be and something pretty wild love this thank you for anything I pretty sure that I rode this jet ski at some point it was a good day I definitely wore pants sir shorts like this when I was a kid so yeah it's it was like that all that stuff's itched in my memory because growing up in the 80s and then also just knowing where this came from and and also the idea that the brief was like this is a Miami kind of inspired car so I was thinking of like super like bright Pantone colors and like super bright like pastels but also fusing them together and adding like really weird ah part stuff too and I just love this stuff and I appreciate you guys letting me have fun and playing with this stuff and this is a prime example of like when I'm allowed to just go bonkers like you get the weird stuff you know well thank you ash I think we should wrap this up yeah I mean I got it now I just got to figure out how to make this thing come to life in the real world but it's great to be able to see it in the virtual world in such an amazing way nowadays yeah it's an extreme privilege so in an honor all right man this thing is awesome ash great job on this thank you guys so much you guys rule appreciate it thank you so much yes [Music] [Applause] [Music] this is the time where you go and raid Ford's Instagram there YouTube for the next five days telling them to build the Hoonah Fox

Channel: Ken Block

Views: 2,433,543

Rating: 4.9128008 out of 5

Keywords: Ken Block, Ken Block Racing, Ken Block Rally, Ken Block Mustang, Ford Mustang, Ford Mustang Fox Body, Fox body, foxbody, notchback, hatchback, mustang notch, Mustang hatch, Hoonicorn, Hoonicorn Mustang, all wheel drive mustang, AWD mustang, Gymkhana Mustang, Hoonicorn V1, Hoonicorn V2, Gymkhana, Ken Block Gymkhana, Los Angeles Gymkhana

Id: 6DCY9n-Sdtc

Length: 20min 33sec (1233 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 30 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/AznTri4d]

I'm super into this. I'm not sure if I missed it, but will this be AWD as well?

[u/elnoobdelosnoobs]

That kit is beautiful, I wonder if there was any YouTube channel that made a body kit from 3d to real life. I mean the proportion does change and it probably has to be adapted

[u/hemihotrod402]

As a huge foxbody fan, I was super excited when this was being teased on Ken's Instagram. The full reveal is everything I ever wanted it to be. I really hope this comes to light as a real car. Those sidepipes....

[u/blacksmith92]

I told myself to always hate the foxbody look. But damn it this looks awesome

[u/lostboyz]

Personally, I really enjoyed the discussion leading up to the reveal, but if you want to skip to it: https://youtu.be/6DCY9n-Sdtc?t=866

[u/Dstanding]

Anyone else wish it was a four-eye? No? Just me?

[u/sharksfarts]

Holy shit, my mullet can only get so erect!