A BMXRacingHistory.com chapter · hosted on Legend Bike Co.

AERO Racing Products

Pants, jerseys, plates, and half the fast guys in the sport wearing the name

For a long time all anybody remembered about Aero was the number plate. That sells the company short. AERO Racing Products, out of Torrance, California, was a full BMX racing-gear line — pants, jerseys, T-shirts, plates, arm guards, gloves, bags — and if you flip through a BMX magazine from the early 1980s, half the fast guys in the sport are wearing the name. I've been around this side of BMX my whole career. Here's the real size of AERO.

Where AERO came from

AERO was started by Karsten Berg when he left MAX. Berg knew the racing-apparel business cold, and when he set up AERO he brought the companies and relationships he'd built at MAX along with him. The company ran out of 4455 Torrance Blvd. in Torrance, California, with the tagline “When second just isn't good enough” and a pitch built on gear “made with the finest materials by skilled craftsmen.” They were big enough to run a UK distributor, too — Wheel Ways over in Grimsby, England.

The Velasquez family and JMV Dreeswear

Berg later moved on, and Joe and Marty Velasquez took the reins — Marty a woman, and every bit a part of running it. The Velasquez family owned JMV Dreeswear, and that's the thread that ties the whole apparel side of the sport together. JMV didn't only make the AERO gear. The same shop sewed the Max pants, the Dyno pants, the TECH pants, Larry Wilcox Actionwear, and JT Racing gear. Once you know one family's factory was behind that many names, a big piece of the 1980s racing-gear scene falls into place.

JMV Dreeswear was the shop that sewed all of these pants back in the day, and it outlasted AERO by years — AERO had realistically shut down well before the end. Joe Velasquez has since passed away, in Rancho Cucamonga. The last job the shop took on was for TECH: a pair of custom BMX shorts for Samantha Cools to race in at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games — the first Olympics to include BMX.

The gear

AERO's line was deep for a company that size:

  • Racing pants — 100% nylon, lined, with hip pads, knee guards and a velcro zipper, waist sizes 22 to 38. You could get them in AERO's own colors or as team replicas in the colors of Redline, Race Inc., Schwinn, GT, and the Trick Team.
  • Replica jerseys — AERO Factory, GT BMX Factory, and Race Inc. Factory, 100% cotton.
  • T-shirts — a whole rider-and-team line: Race Inc., Brent Patterson, John Crews, Harry Leary, GT BMX, an R.L. Osborn Stylin' tee, a Denny Davidow tee, and a Ralph's Bicycle tee.
  • Number plates — the Stadium Plate, big enough to fit AERO's 8-inch Stadium Numbers yet contoured to cut wind resistance. It shows up in the magazines around December 1981, and by early 1983 AERO was cutting open, vented plate faces for better airflow. Those old AERO plates are collector pieces now.
  • Deflectors — an adjustable elbow-and-forearm protector, offered in AERO colors and as Race Inc. and GT BMX replicas.
  • Stylin' BMX gloves — a leather-and-Spandex glove built for BMX, no palm padding to fuss with.
  • Bags and stickers — helmet bags, a freestyle bag, a bike bag, and the AERO sticker sheets every kid stuck on something.

The riders

This is the part that shows how big AERO really was. They outfitted a who's-who of factory riders across the whole sport — guys who raced for one brand and wore AERO on top of it. John “John Boy” Crews on Redline. Denny Davidow on Skyway. Andy Patterson on GT. Brent Patterson and Harry Leary with their own signature tees. And the BMX Action Trick Team — R.L. Osborn and Mike Buff — ran AERO pants top to bottom (the ad's own line: “the entire Trick Team uses AERO pants”). You'll also see AERO gear on Bassett, DG, and CW riders in the period photos.

Here's the thing people get wrong: for all those riders, AERO never ran a factory team of its own. It co-sponsored a lot of teams — the Free Agent team most of all — and a lot of the teams it ended up backing were teams that had left MAX, because Karsten Berg was taking the companies he'd worked with at MAX and putting them under AERO. The brand grew off those relationships, not off a house team.

MAX, AERO, and the riders caught in the middle

There's a story under all of this, and it starts with a problem. MAX was owned by Torker — so when a rider from another team showed up in MAX pants, he was, in a small way, promoting Torker. A lot of companies hated that. That's the itch Karsten Berg was scratching when he left MAX to start AERO: a stand-alone gear brand a rider could wear without shilling somebody else's bikes. MAX did not take Berg's departure well, and the two brands went at each other hard through the early-to-mid 1980s, both chasing the same short list of fast riders. Flip their ads side by side and you'll catch the same names bouncing between them — Denny Davidow turns up in both, wearing one brand in one magazine and the other in the next. Riders got used as pawns in a gear-company fight.

The same logic gave rise to Dyno, Bob Morales' brand, built to take on MAX and AERO. But Morales soon designed a frame and sold Dyno to GT — and once GT owned it, GT's riders pulled their gear off AERO and moved to Dyno. The catch caught up with Dyno later: with GT's name on it, no other team wanted to wear Dyno pants either, and Dyno eventually stopped making them and put its team in AXO gear. Same trap MAX was in — which is the whole reason a rider's pants were never just pants in that era.

What we don't know yet

  • The exact years AERO started and wound down.
  • The point Berg left and the Velasquez family took over.
  • The full list of teams AERO co-sponsored beyond Free Agent.

Got an AERO catalog, an old team photo, or gear with the name on it? Send it in and it goes on the chapter with the credit.

Related Legend Bike Co. chapters

Sources

Period AERO Racing Products ads in BMX Action magazine (“When Second Just Isn't Good Enough” and “Breakthroughs”), archived at oldschoolmags.com — documenting the Torrance address, the product line (racing pants with team-replica colors, replica jerseys, the rider/team T-shirt line, the Stadium Plate and 8-inch Stadium Numbers, Deflectors, Stylin' gloves, bags), and the riders shown (John Crews, Denny Davidow, Andy Patterson, Brent Patterson, Harry Leary, R.L. Osborn and Mike Buff of the BMX Action Trick Team). Bill Ryan, Legend Bike Co. — firsthand: AERO's origin under Karsten Berg out of MAX, the handoff to Joe and Marty Velasquez, the family's JMV Dreeswear as the manufacturer behind AERO, Max, Dyno, TECH, Larry Wilcox Actionwear and JT Racing, and AERO's team co-sponsorships including Free Agent with no factory team of its own. Number-plate dating cross-referenced to Michael Gamstetter's BMX number-plate timeline (period Bicycle Motocross Action issues) and BMXmuseum.com collector listings.

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