In fact, these days making a scene is basically his job. His Gymkhana series of Youtube videos, which feature him pulling crazy drift stunts and four wheel burnouts in a series of heavily customised cars, have been phenomenally successful. He’s racked up more than 300 million views across the nine episodes they’ve made so far, each one bigger, and more spectacular than the last.

What’s interesting is that this latest career move, the one which has made him the most famous, came about somewhat by accident. “Gymkhana itself is a small, grass roots motorsport with obstacles that require you to slide around them, instead of driving around them,” Ken told us, 12 years after the first Gymkhana video hit the internet.

“I started doing that a couple of years into my race career, and then built a specific car to do that. But the guy who ran the series in Southern California where I lived quit, so I had this amazing, fun, gymkhana car with nowhere to drive it. And that’s how the series got started. I went back to where I’d done gymkhana races which was the El Toro Airfield in California and we filmed the first Gymkhana video there.”.

Block had been driving rally cars for some time, and earning some pretty solid results in competitions. He had even driven in the World Rally Championships. But his day job – what he was really known for – was as one of the head honchos at DC. He’d co-founded the skateboarding and apparel brand in the early 90s with his friend Damon Way and went on to build into a global empire, eventually selling it to Quiksilver for a cool $87 million [£65 million] in 2003.

“No.” he admits, without hesitation. “I knew that when we made the first [film] it was something that I liked to watch, and that we had fun making it, and I enjoyed the creativity of the editing and the story telling. But, once that took off , it then became sort of a goal to make each one different, and unique, and try and get even more views.”

If the success of that first video was unexpected, Block’s response to it – building it into a series and a brand in its own right – shouldn’t have surprised anyone who knew him. As his career at DC showed, he was never one to pass up an opportunity to do crazy things, and loved testing his limits. He once famously drove his into a snow park in New Zealand, hitting a monster kicker while DC pros Eddie Wall and Torstein Horgmo jumped beside him.

These days, Block has now largely left the world of board sports behind. He parted ways with DC after years in charge (and five successful Gymkhana episodes) to concentrate on motorsport full time. Although Gymkhana Nine sees a return to what Ken himself calls “simple, raw driving” the more recent episodes of the series, including one that saw Block take to the streets of Dubai, have been sponsored by different brands, including his own car-focussed clothing company Hoonigan.