Gymkhana king Ken Block is focused on just two things this year: He wants to win gold at all four of this year's Global X Games and he want to win the Global RallyCross championship.
Last year's Ford Fiesta HFHV - basically a retuned WRC weapon - wasn't quite up to the job, although Block qualified it on pole a couple of times, finished second at the Los Angeles X Games led most of the final race at Las Vegas; not bad for a rookie season!
So Block and Hoonigan Racing team manager Derek Dauncey went to Malcolm Wilson at M-Sport (the Cumbria-based outfit that has built Ford's WRC cars for the past 16 years) with a new brief: build us a car specifically for rallycross.
And here it is.
Show some respect for the Ford Fiesta ST RX43, built from the ground up on a new-model Fiesta bodyshell.
Dauncey explained: “We went to M-Sport for this build for a lot of reasons. We learned a lot last year in Ken's debut Global Rallycross season and we were able to take that information, pass it along to the engineering team at M-Sport and have them create an absolute beast of a car.”
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Neither Hoonigan nor M-Sport have given away any information about exactly what is under the bonnet of the RX43 but, after driving the car for the first time, Block said: “I'm absolutely stoked on how this car has turned out.
“My Ford Fiesta HFHV last year was awesome, but the RX43 is really on a whole new level. Malcolm and the team at M-Sport took all of our input and made some radical improvements.
“I'm feeling absolutely confident that I'll have one of the best cars on the grid when we kick off the Rallycross season in Brazil next month.”
Block's first competitive outing with the RX43 will be at the first of four Global X Games, the X Games Brazil on 21 April.