Ken Block, on the Making of 'Gymkhana 5' A video posted to YouTube on Monday, in which the driver Ken Block flogs a 650-horsepower Ford Fiesta on the streets of San Francisco, accumulated 5.1 million views in its first 24 hours and was on pace to surpass 10 million views on Wednesday. But for progressive-minded civic leaders hoping to lure Block to their cities to produce similarly virtuosic displays of tourist-baiting cinema, there are prerequisites. For one, a very good film commission. "San Francisco was amazing to us," Block said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. We laid out specifically what we wanted to do and where, and the police and film commission really worked hard to make it happen. Block and his producers were given the run of the city's streets and, in an opening sequence to inspire incredulous gasps from East Bay commuters, the Oakland Bay Bridge. With its seams well-hidden, little would suggest the 10-minute film came together over four days of shooting in May. "There's no way you can one-take this kind of production," Block said. We had limited time in each area to get the shots we needed. The evocations of "Bullitt," the 1968 film in which Steve McQueen pursued a Dodge Charger over the peninsula in a fastback Ford Mustang, are strong but not overt. ""Bullitt" was definitely in mind," Block said. It's one of the most iconic chase scenes. But nobody really had used these roads in a way that showed what a modern car could do. Block's vehicle, a custom-built 650-horsepower Ford Fiesta rally car, was created for use in gymkhana (pronounced jim-KAH-nah), a sanctioned motorsport with roots in Japan, in which drivers maneuver their cars around obstacles, often in controlled skids, or drifts, and are awarded based on the speed with which they dispatch the course's mandated challenges. In the video - the fifth in a series of gymkhana-style productions financed by DC Shoes, the apparel company co-founded by Block - the driver executes 360-degree drifts around moving trolley cars, as well as around Travis Pastrana, the X Games fixture turned Nascar Nationwide driver, as he performs a wheelie on a motocross bike. Neither the course through San Francisco nor the filming schedule left much margin for error, Block said. Asked if he would have liked to reshoot certain sections of the video, Block, a self-described hoon - someone who drives in a loutish, potentially reckless manner - effects a figure skater who slightly over-rotated on his triple-lutz. "There was the first and second turn, just after we came off the Bay Bridge, where I felt I could've pulled in neater," he said. But I only got two tries on it. The second one, though, was pretty good. The hoon effects a diplomat when asked where he might like to next deploy his gymkhana skills. "I'd like to go to a lot of different cities - Portland, Seattle, Dallas, New York, maybe Paris," he said. They'd all be great. But you really couldn't pick a more iconic city, for its mix of roads and features, than San Francisco.