Images by Roy Lin
This is a love letter to both modern rifles and superbikes. No better culminated than with the Superleggera SCAR.
Self-important elites seek to neuter and castrate our society. Socialist billionaires and legions of Marxist lawmakers subjugate us to protect us from ourselves, and amorphous drones bleakly grind though a modern Orwellian Animal Farm. A gray slog of consumerism — predictable, programmable, profitable. Boring.
A few still stand in defiance to a categorized and cultivated existence. Two gleaming examples of rebellion to this societal emasculation are the superbike and modern sporting rifle. Few things pierce the veil of conformity like a 400-pound, 200-horsepower missile and a magazine fed semi-automatic rifle. Obedient and feeble automatons cower in the face of such brutal displays of self-determination.
These glorious examples of mechanical mutiny are similar in so many various ways. For example, in direct contrast to their cultural insubordination, they require training and responsibility — at least if you want to be any good. They don’t suffer idiots lightly. They don’t forgive you or others for stupidity. They boldly let the professionals know who the amateurs are very quickly. The immature should be found elsewhere.
If you have ridden a superbike with serious intent, you already sense the similarities. I’m not talking about running down the road on your friends CBR. I’m not even talking about when I would blast down the All-American during my lunch breaks at the Q-course. I mean ridden competitively on a racetrack, all out, against others.
When a superbike or rifle is set up properly something magical happens: it almost totally disappears.
When things are right, your focus on the tool dissipates. You purely focus on the task at hand. Only the mechanical functions and switchgear are occasional reminders. The rifle and superbike synergies between man and machine are unlike anything else.
The theories about what makes a “good” rifle do vary. I’ll start discussing most of what I believe to be true by comparing the superbike this SCAR is modeled after, the Ducati Superleggera. Dreamed up by a hero of mine, Ducati’s CEO, Claudio Domenicali. He’s a racer that became CEO, he lives what his company makes. He is often found mingling with customers at events and riding with them at track days, it’s very personal to him. He once described riding a Superleggera on a race track as an “intimate” experience. Some say it, he lives it.
The Ducati Superleggera is the epitome of a motorcycle available to us.
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