It's not a risky statement to say that machines are built to do something. Despite the waxing and waning on the open road, as a tool in the purest sense, a motorcycle is not a philosophy class. It exists because someone needed to design something to fulfill a task. Simple as. "Function comes first," Mattia Biagi says. The Husqvarna WR430 was built in 1981 to race in the dirt and not break down. That was its only reason for existing. And yet, forty years later, it does something else entirely for Mattia.
For all of us, presence is slippery. It's easier to live in yesterday or spend the currency of now at the expense of, or as a benefit to the future. But when Mattia rides his WR430 into the hills, there's no choice but to be here. Now. "It's the only time I'm really in the moment," he says. The two-stroke engine doesn't allow wandering thoughts. The mechanical simplicity is absolute: no ABS, no traction control, no stabilizers to catch you if you screw up. The outcome is entirely yours. The machine only does what you tell it to do. Mistakes are you. Success is you. Learning is you.
Mattia's relationship with motorcycles didn't begin in the dirt. He's a visual person. Art came first. Born into a family that didn't exactly embrace art as a career, Mattia moved to Los Angeles two decades ago and fell into his creative practice. His studio became a refuge, a place where heat, molten tar, and the physicality of making things consumed him. "When I'm in the studio, I'm sweating, I'm burning my hands, I'm breathing it all in. It's alive," he explains. The smell of hot asphalt, the risk of injury, the danger that sharpens your senses, these were familiar long before he ever threw a leg over the Husky.
It's plain to him that there are parallels between making art and riding an old dirt bike. Both demand attention. Both have a physicality that forces presence. Both leave you dirty. The melted tar in his studio smells different than the rain-soaked dirt in the mountains, but they live in the same part of his brain. The part that appreciates risk and demands full engagement. "In both cases, you're taking something raw and figuring it out with your hands," he says. "You don't just think about it. You do it."
The WR430 is not a modern bike. It doesn’t pretend to make things easier. Mattia's friends ride the new stuff, modern, beautiful machines that are technically better in almost every way. Lighter, faster, safer, smarter. But that's part of the problem. "The new bikes are too good. They do too much for you," he says. The machine has evolved to solve too many problems, to protect you from yourself, to flatten the learning curve into something sterile. For Mattia, that's a dead end. There is no room for personal evolution if the machine doesn't require anything from you.
The WR430 still demands. It asks questions of your skill. It withholds forgiveness. It forces you to figure it out. When Mattia bought it, it was his first two-stroke. "I had no idea what I was doing," he says. "I had to Google how to mix the fuel. I'm at 52:1 now, but at the beginning I didn’t even know what that meant." Even the basics of running the thing became a small education. But this, too, is part of why it fits. The bike’s usefulness has evolved into something much bigger than its original design brief. It's a tool for his own personal growth. A machine that brings him fully into the moment, not by design, but by necessity.
The WR430’s two-stroke engine is at the center of it all. Unlike four-strokes, where power builds in measured waves, the WR430 hits instantly. Combustion on every revolution. No valves, no cams, no electronic mediation. The engine breathes and barks, responding to the subtlest twitch of the throttle. "When you open it up, it just goes," Mattia says. "You have to be ready for it. It's a totally different animal."
When Husqvarna engineered the WR430 in '81, it was Sweden’s crown jewel of enduro competition. An 86mm bore and 74mm stroke gave it 430cc of raw displacement. Air-cooled, twin-shock, and built to eat through woods, desert, and cross-country races. But the simplicity went deeper than just specs. There’s no counterbalancer, which means it vibrates unapologetically at every RPM. The powerband is narrow, which means the engine lives in a violent surge between too little and too much. The expansion chamber amplifies that torque like a hammer, hitting hard when it comes on pipe. Brakes? Simple drums up front and rear, strong enough if you plan ahead, useless if you don't. No electronics. No forgiveness. It’s a machine that punishes hesitation and rewards rhythm.
It was light for its size, highly competitive, and simple enough to fix with basic tools if you knew what you were doing. At the ISDE and other enduro events, this bike earned its place in the dirt.
But for Mattia, its racing pedigree is a footnote for why it exists, not how it does today. The real story happens on California mountain trails, alone, where the only thing between control and disaster is his own ability. Where every slip, every save, every corner taken cleanly, belongs entirely to him. It's physical, meditative, and dangerous enough to keep him awake in ways the studio once did.
When he finishes a ride, gear dirty, arms tired, bike coated in dust, there's a satisfaction that mirrors the end of a long day in the studio. It's the evidence of work done well. The parallels are obvious: in both art and riding, you take something raw and imperfect and shape it through your own hands. "You don’t watch, you do. You don’t observe, you engage. You evolve," he says. And when he looks at the Husky, he sees nothing he'd change. It's not a blank canvas to modify or update. It's perfect as it is. The design holds up. The machine still does exactly what it was built to do, but now, it also does something else entirely. It carries Mattia into the place he needs most: right here, right now.
