Ken Block on Top Gear

[Rick Brown]

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[Lisa Severy]

Spectacular and skilled driving to be sure, but I am truly surprised that an active airport (and the FAA) would allow such an activity. I wonder what the pilot of the one plane taxiing was thinking as the car tore by. I somehow doubt he said "Hi Ken, nice to see you again! Great driving!" I wonder what the owners of the aircraft tied-down around which Ken "slalomed" think when they see this video! My father owned an airplane and I grew up around general aviation at a small airport. My father's friends and other aircraft owners put a lot of love, time and money into their planes. In this video, no airworthy aircraft appear to have been harmed, but if Ken practices there regularly, the risks for an incident would certainly be increased. Maybe Ken is so good that he never makes a mistake, but what would happen if a tire blew, or something failed on the car? It makes me very sad to think that this talented young man, and the producers and host of my favorite show, Top Gear, would do something like this that could put aircraft and their owners/pilots at risk. Seems disrespectful to the owners of the airworthy aircraft.

[Lisa Severy]

I did forget to add that I hope that the scene with the Cessna Skymaster was staged.

[Steve Ekstrand]

If you don't have an oops, you're not going fast enough, hard enough, close enough for it to matter.

Ken Block makes plenty of mistakes.


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1:04 in this vid is a preview of the headlines that are waiting to be written.... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6K5OSiC7 ... re=related" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Mako Koiwai]

There are Ken Block Blooper video's out there ... you can see from the skid marks that they're not exactly on Take 1. It would have been very easy to have composited that plane in for that jumping shot towards the end ... but there is that 2nd 3/4 rear angle that's a perfect match to it. It could also have been composited, but they DO actually rehearse those stunt a LOT ... so they could have fairly easily timed when Ken and Bike Boy had to peel out to get the timing correct.

We use that airfield quite a bit to shoot car commercials. Note how nice and black some of those runways are ... perfect for filming. There are very few flights in and out of that airfield so we often only have to clear the runway in use at the end of the day when the FEDEX puddle jumper comes in.

At the Mohave air field they once actually painted the yellow interrupted lines at a non standard spacing to help make it look like the car was moving faster then it was.