BATMOBILE VIBES: TRAVIS BARKER’S CUSTOM POLARIS SLINGSHOT

Travis Barker has been featured in DUB Magazine since our early days…and rightfully so. His collection of rides and lifestyle over the years is what dreams are made of. From his famous collection of custom Cadillacs, his massive lifted truck featured in Issue 9 back in 2000, to his current fleet of murdered-out luxury rides. Travis drives nothing stock. So when the opportunity came up to team up with him on his Polaris Slingshot SL, we knew that it would be a fantastic collaboration with someone we’ve enjoyed working with over the years.

Slingshot Best of the Builders: East vs. West

Polaris challenged Travis and us to build the “sickest 2020 Slingshot SL” in the United States, competing with a team from the East in Alex Vega’s The AutoFirm and Teyana Taylor.

Travis had his new Slingshot SL dropped off to go over his vision for the 3-wheeler. He worked with Myles Kovacs, Co-founder of DUB, to look at the possibilities and go from there. We had an idea of what Travis wanted, but he gave us the added challenge of transforming it from red to an all-black ride.

“I had been selling all of my cars that weren’t black. My Lowriders, trucks, everything went, and all my rides right now are newer vehicles. All of them are black, so that was one of the requirements I gave to them. It’s gotta be murdered out. I think the goal is Batmobile vibes,” Travis detailed.

Myles added, “As clean and sleek black is, it can be very challenging only working with black. But our job as a build team is to create a Slingshot that is in concert with our client’s personality, and we couldn’t be happier with the finished result.”

“We’re DUB, and anything we do has to have a set of aftermarket wheels. Travis wanted ‘whatever the biggest rim we could fit in there,’ and we gave that to him in a one-off set of 24-inch Dropstars wheels. We went with a split 5-spoke swept design that kinda reminds me of an AR-15 adjustable rifle buttstock”, Myles elaborates.

During the reveal, Travis recalled the plans he intimated to us for the build during the planning and design session, just a couple of weeks before we loosened a single bolt on the Slingshot. “For the stance, we have to go with an air ride setup. I want it so low you can’t even move it. When you park it and let all the air out, you couldn’t even tow it. That was my goal,” Travis explained.

“With the seats, because I think it is like a motorcycle-hybrid, I wanted it to have the comfort and luxury of a car and, of course, black,” revealing Travis’ familiarity to bespoke European sports cars.

Musicians and producers need their studio set up to be sonically flawless, and their ride’s stereo system needs to be equally perfect. Travis is no different. He’s a major audiophile. “The majority of the time when I listen to mixes, I actually leave the studio, and I go sit in my car, and I listen to them there. The system’s gotta hit hard!” Travis points out.

Off to the Races: The Build

With a limited amount of time to get the Slingshot together, our team scrambled to tear it down, source parts, and put it back together, which would usually be a relatively easy task. But doing the same during a pandemic proved otherwise.

The short time frame combined with a shortage in parts due to production delays everywhere was a challenge.

It required us to approach the project with an all-hands-on-deck mentality to get the entire team calling around, driving to vendors, and even getting custom fabricated parts together.

Practicing social distancing during reassembly and fabricating custom audio panels for the Slingshot added more pressure to get things done on time. But we’re professionals, and like always, we just rolled up our sleeves, grinded, and persevered until the project was completed.

The Slingshot Effect with Travis

“When they pulled the cover off, I was blown away!

It is such a night and day difference from when I first had it to when DUB completed it. It’s crazy, and I’ve seen a ton of these on the street and nothing looks like this.

This car is really fun; I’ve been in La Ferraris, I’ve been in Lamborghinis and I feel like this car is more comfortable than some of those cars. I love the sleek glossy black mixed with the matte. The Slingshot done up by DUB is a flashy car, and it’s like a Ninja at the same time.

From a distance, it looks like it’s just black but when you get up close to it you realize there’s a lot of details there. I feel like we’ve tweaked it in a way that I’ve never seen. This would be sick down PCH or something. I love it.”

And the winner is…

I found out we had won when I checked my IG and saw it was blowing up, and I was getting tagged in a bunch of posts. It’s satisfying to see the whole process come together to transform the Slingshot into a custom ride that I had envisioned and then having everyone vote for our Slingshot build. And the best part is I can now finally take it out and ride around L.A.! Much love to Polaris for including me in the Best of the Builders and Myles and the DUB team for putting together this badass Slingshot!

It was rad seeing the build process and getting sneak peeks from the DUB guys on IG, and seeing some of the stuff The AutoFirm was doing to Teyana’s Slingshot. Some of the comments were pretty cool, too, and got me pumped to see the finished build. Many of my boys have been hitting me up to drive the Slingshot once I got it back.

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