Category: Nitrocross

She might only be 16, but Lia Block is already building up quite the motorsport resume.

The eldest of the late rally and Gymkhana icon Ken Block’s three children has already been turning heads on the national rallying scene in the States, taking three class wins from four this year, and dominated on her recent appearance in Nitrocross’ second-tier NEXT class only for a post-race ruling to stamp out a comfortable win.

Last weekend she made her debut in Extreme E in Sardinia, adding another string to her ever-expanding bow.

“It’s definitely crazy,” Block tells RACER of her Extreme E debut. “I came in with not too high of expectations. I’m just trying to do what I always do, which is just put my head down and try to put some lap times down and just learn as much as possible and as little time as possible.

“I actually had a lot of fun this weekend, going in a new car, new team, new series, new competitors, everything. So, brand new, but at the same time, I did feel very much at home in this series.”

Seeing Block integrate herself into the Extreme E paddock right away was hardly surprising for those of us on the outside looking in – she grew up in track paddocks and rally service parks – but even for someone who’s lived and breathed top-level motorsport for her entire life, getting on-track with some of the sport’s biggest names was a big moment for her.

“The biggest thing for me was coming in here and seeing big names like Sebastien Loeb, and getting to race against my ‘brother’, Andreas [Bakkerud, her father’s teammate in World Rallycross], and, all the big names and drivers that I’ve watched race my dad or just on TV when I was younger, so it was a really cool experience,” she says. “And the car is definitely like nothing I’ve ever driven before. Same with the track, like mixed rally, rallycross, circuit racing, off-road, altogether mixing this one thing? Yeah, it was just really cool.”

It didn’t take long for her to make an impression on that track, either. She held a best sector time for much of the very first session of the weekend, only for a late charge by Mattias Ekstrom – a World Rallycross and two-time DTM champion, no less – to turn her purple sector to green late on. Everyone in the paddock was impressed, but Block? She wasn’t surprised.

“To be honest, not really, I pick up things really fast,” she explains. “I was honestly, in the beginning, frustrated a little bit – coming in, new, when everybody else has been in the series for a while, or at least had one race under the belt. I was just focused on myself, just trying to learn the car and the track and how it handles everything.”

She wasn’t the only one who knew the speed was there, either. Derek Dauncey has known Block since she was born, having worked with her father for over 16 years, mentoring him and overseeing his Hoonigan Racing Division team.

“Over the last four weeks, we’ve done Southern Ohio rally, ticked the box there and won the class,” Dauncey tells RACER. “We went to Nitro, and Nitro was like a real baptism of fire. What we’ve done is, we’ve chucked her into the fire for the last four weeks, in theory, and she comes out without a scorch mark on her.

“She’s got a very strong attitude. She has a very good confidence in her ability. One of the biggest driving forces, and we’ve had chats about it, is basically if your mind is not there, if you doubt yourself, you’re never going to be quick.”

The confidence is evident, and the natural ability is something that’s been there since her very first run in a car too, as Dauncey shares.

“She always wanted to drive her Mom’s car, so always just said to her that you can only drive it when you can press the clutch pedal fully down, then we’ll see. Of course, that came around quite quickly,” he says.

“So we put her into the rally school at Tim O’Neil’s, and within half an hour, they phoned me – we were testing up the top with the rally cars and Lia was on the school. I trust all the instructors, but Chris Komar, I worked with, because I worked with Ken at Subaru USA from 2005, so I knew him for 16 years – Chris phoned me and said. ‘you’ve gotta come down.’

“So I went down there, and he didn’t say anything, just said ‘watch this.’ Lia had six other drivers, I won’t say who they were, but two of them were good drivers, and the way she handled the car, backed it in… he was really impressed. So the next day we put her into her mom’s car, which is the R2 car.

“I did the young driver program at Mitsubishi,” he adds. “It’s very difficult to tell parents that their son or daughter won’t make it. But there’s a real feelgood factor here.”

When testing the R2 Ford Fiesta the next day, she continued to impress.

“We set up a full stage, an Olympus test road that we normally use, and I sat with her,” Dauncey recalls. “And if I didn’t know who she was, I’d swear somebody was ringing me, because the experience and talent that she had on that one run I’ll never ever forget.

“If the person hasn’t got speed, you’re going to struggle. She had speed but also, which is really important, is she had a real good feel for grip and where the grip was, even on that test stage, straightaway. So I phoned Ken back up, who is in the hotel, he came down at the end of the day and I said ‘we have an option here.’

“It was a pleasant surprise, but all she’s done since then, she’s just excelled.”

Being the daughter of one of the biggest names in motorsport over the last 20 years, it’d be easy to think her talent is simply genetic. But ask her, and she’ll immediately insist she’s her own person with her own aims. Dauncey sees things differently, too.

“You watch the videos, and she’s a bit anti-Ken,” he says. “Her lines are beautiful and she’s basically carrying loads of momentum. And you can see on the stage results. The biggest problem with a young driver is obviously we see this zigzag of stage times. In Oregon, I think she did a fifth, fourth, third, third, second, second, third, fourth –  that’s overall time, not class time. So the speed is there, and her consistency is really good.”

With the name Block, and an impressive showing in multiple forms of loose surface competition already, you’d figure that she’d have a nailed on future in rallying, but that might not necessarily be the case. Block knows the motorsport world is her oyster, but she knows she’s got plenty of time to figure it out, too.

“Honestly, I’m so young right now… I don’t really know where I want to go,” she admits. “I have been doing some open-wheel stuff, and I’ve been karting since I was really little, but I’ve also done rally, rallycross, and now Extreme E, but ultimately, I think a world championship of some sort, you know, whether that’s F1, WRC, or World Rallycross.

“I think that I’m going to have to figure out what path I want to go down in the next couple of years. But eventually, I want to be racing with the top, top [drivers].

“I’ve been karting since I was 11. And I’ve done multiple open-wheel tests. I do you really love circuit racing, but just depends if I have the speed or not.”

Dauncey adds: “Time’s an enemy as we go along. Every year that goes by, or every six months goes by, some people can say it cuts this off, it shuts this down, but at the moment, if you look at where the feelgood factor is for her and how quick she is, we haven’t really dispelled one of them formally yet.

“She’s quick in rallies, quick in rallycross, Pikes Peak could be interesting, there’s some interest asking about Le Mans, we’ve done some open-wheel stuff with her and she’s done fairly well at that. The family have a decision to make in a couple of months time, because we need to be sure, if we’re moving formula or going back to rally, we need to come up with a plan for next year.”

Block’s unprompted mention of Formula 1 was a curious one. Of course, her father famously was in line for an F1 test with Pirelli at the end of 2011, only for his six-foot frame to prove too tall for the Toyota TF109 that the Italian firm was using at the time. But could she make the move, for real, instead?

“I think I think that there’s an interest there, there’s a big interest there,” Dauncey says. “I mean, it’s a big effort to get through karting and come up through the formulas. And you look at the amount of money that’s thrown into that. But again, it’s something that we are looking at.

“I spoke to George Russell’s management in the early part of the year… you’ve got to be, like, $6 million down to basically to get to somewhere where one of the junior academies look at you, [but] we have two academies watching her.

“The interesting thing is, basically, she’s not like her dad. She’s looking at open-wheel. But also, he was very happy – the discussion, I got a text message that we were bouncing back just before Christmas, he was going to be very happy to go follow her and sit in the stands and watch her around the track. So the conversation we had in October was he wanted to give the three of them, – because Mika [Lia’s younger brother], he’s also car-mad and could be something different – he wanted to give all three of them the opportunity to succeed in life.

“So with Lia, I know that she’s got massive, massive options in rally or off-road. Formula 1 will take more effort. I wouldn’t shut the door to everything. It’d be very difficult.”

But for now, at least, the focus remains on the loose surfaces. Block, along with her mother Lucy, will be contesting this weekend’s New England Forest Rally. It’s then back to Nitrocross in Utah in August, before a return to the Extreme E fold in September.

“I think this one was just basically a practice round, you know,” Block says, reflecting on the past weekend. “It started off okay, but then definitely got a lot better throughout the weekend.

“The takeaway for me is really just experience. It’s something new. And just, this is a practice round. So we take everything I’ve learned and take it into the next race.”