2022: Hoonigan Electrikhana, Las Vegas

Moment in drift history · Global

Ken Block in the Audi S1 Hoonitron, drift-adjacent cinema in an electric, all-wheel-drive purpose-built car. The genre opens its door to EVs while the culture is still arguing whether they belong inside.

Ken Block had launched the Gymkhana series in 2008 as a precision car-control film format. By 2022 the format was fourteen years old and the petrol cars he had used were starting to feel like ancestors. The Electrikhana film was the deliberate next step, same camera language, same choreographed precision, but a purpose-built Audi S1 Hoonitron designed and built by Audi Sport.

The Hoonitron is a 1,000+ horsepower full-electric AWD purpose-built drift / Gymkhana machine. Block drove it on the Las Vegas Strip at night, doing donuts past the Wynn, drifting under the casino lights, weaving between traffic-cone gates set up across the boulevard. The footage looks unmistakeably Gymkhana, even without combustion noise.

For drift culture, the film was the visible opening of the genre to EVs. The discipline-purists had been arguing since the early 2010s whether silent electric drift could ever count. Electrikhana did not settle the argument; it just demonstrated, on the most cinematic platform available, that the visual language transfers without the engine note.