By: Dave Abrahams
Park City, Utah - If lots is good, more is better and too much is just right. This favourite petrolhead saying is actually attributed to 1930s movie star Mae West, but it could be Ken Block's motto.
We all loved Block's over-the-top 1965 Ford Mustang Hoonicorn RTR in Gymkhana 7, but Block had ideas for his next Gymkhana video that needed more power. So he asked his technical team to bolt a turbo on to each bank of the car's custom-built Roush 6.7-litre V8.
They not only made and fitted the necessary manifolds, although they had to cut three gaping holes in the bonnet to do it, but along the way they also converted the engine to run on methanol, which is made from the methane gas that petrol refineries usually burn just to get rid if it. It’s toxic, corrosive and horribly hygroscopic - and you have to use a lot of it - but it burns cooler than petrol and produces about 20 percent more power.
Methanol also burns with a much cleaner and more stable flame than petrol, as Block demonstrates in the video below.
The result is Hoonicorn V2, running 1.5 bar of boost for a howling 1030kW - fourteen hundred American cowboy horses! - which are then distributed among all four wheels, to the severe detriment of their Toyo gumballs.
"When I say that this is the absolute most frightening thing I've ever driven, I'm not exaggerating," said Block. "It shreds the tyres so quickly that I can't change gears fast enough.
"It's genuinely a mind-numbing, crazy experience to try to drive this thing. It's amazing."
After the cut-and-burn job on the bonnet, the Mustang also needed a respray, so the team combined the 'stars and stripes' theme first seen on Block's MkII Escort classic rally car with a reflective pattern similar to his Fiesta RX43 rallycross racer, over a base paint that fades from grey to black across the car, for a surprisingly understated (by Block's standards) but unmistakeable look.
And just in case you wanted to refresh your memory…