Brian Scura & BS Bikeworks

Inventor of the Gyro, the Race Lace Hub, and the SST Catalog

A BMXRacingHistory.com preview · hosted on Legend Bike Co

At a glance

Companies BS Bikes (1981-82 factory team era) · Scura Speed & Technology Inc. (SST) · later licensing partner to GT Bicycles and Odyssey BMX
Known for Inventing the Gyro cable detangler (1986) · the SST Race Lace hub, later the GT Superlace · the Dirt Skirt headset seal · the SST Command Post · the Take-a-Brake brake-adjustment tool · the Vans Kool Stop BMX brake shoe
Recognition 2025 USA BMX Hall of Fame inductee, Industry category

Here is the BMX figure most riders never read about by name. They owned his products anyway. Brian Scura was a freestyle rider who ran BS Bikes as an early factory team in 1981-82, then built Scura Speed & Technology Inc. (SST) to sell the parts he kept designing. He licensed the Gyro to Odyssey. He sold the Race Lace hub pattern to GT. And he put his name on a run of small components that fixed real problems on race and freestyle bikes all through the 1980s. In June 2025, USA BMX announced his induction into the BMX Hall of Fame in the Industry category, part of the 40th-anniversary class.

BS Bikes — the 1981-82 factory team

Before SST was the name people knew, Scura ran his own bike company under his initials. BS Bikes operated as a small factory team in 1981 and 1982. That is the same window the "B.S. Dirt Skirt" first showed up and built the headset-seal product into the line. Billy Griggs ("Mr. Bill"), who would later turn pro and take two amateur World Championships, rode for BS Bikes through his amateur years in 1981 and 1982. Parents complained about what the BS shorthand spelled out. So Scura renamed the company in the wider brand rebuild — the operation that became Scura Speed & Technology Inc.

Scura himself kept riding through this stretch. Period coverage in 23mag's rider archive has him on a GT-sponsored bike as early as 1985, appearing in BMX Plus Freestyle's "Raddest Tricks" video that year and in a GTV video release in 1986 — the same year the Gyro hit shops. The product man and the rider were the same guy, right up through the peak of the SST catalog.

Scura Speed & Technology Inc. (SST)

SST was the umbrella over everything that came next. The earliest patent on file from the company — the design patent for the Take-a-Brake tool — was filed January 17, 1983 and granted October 29, 1985 under the assignee name Scura Speed & Tech, Incorporated. A second design patent for an SST bicycle hub was filed June 6, 1983 and granted the same day. Those two dates put SST on the books as a registered, patenting product company by the start of 1983.

The SST product list ran from one end of the BMX bike to the other. Race Lace hubs were the headline. It was a hub-and-spoke pattern with all the spokes running to the outside face of the flange, only the heads showing on the inside. Forum collectors at BMXmuseum.com track Scura selling SST Race Lace hubs as early as 1983, and the pattern usually gets placed as the top-end race wheel of 1984-85. GT Bicycles later bought the design from Scura and produced it as the GT Superlace.

SST also made a Race Lace coaster-brake version for freestyle. The SST Command Post was a seat post built around an internal I-beam so it would not bend. The Dirt Skirt was a headset seal that kept dirt and grime out of the lower bearings. The Take-a-Brake was a hand tool for adjusting side-pull brakes, and it was Scura's first granted U.S. patent. He also designed the Vans Kool Stop BMX brake shoe, which by his own 1987 estimate was moving around a quarter-million units a year.

The Gyro — 1986

The thing that put Scura's name in every BMX shop in the country was a small alloy assembly bolted to the head tube. The Gyro is a cable detangler. A split-cable system, it lets a freestyle rider spin the handlebars a full 360 degrees without tangling the brake cables. One cable runs from the brake lever to a swivel on the frame. A second runs from the swivel to the rear caliper.

Scura was not first to the idea. The ACS Rotor — created by Steve Potts for Mike Buff and licensed to ACS, per Bill Ryan, firsthand, 2026 — was the original commercial rear-cable detangler, hitting the market in 1985. The Gyro followed in 1986. Collectors and historians tell the split the same way: the Rotor opened the category, and the Gyro is the design that displaced it. Every detangler built after the Gyro traces back to its split-cable layout.

The way it got to market is well-documented in the period press. Scura licensed production to Odyssey BMX, which holds the Gyro trademark today out of Cerritos, California — and by 23mag's rider-archive account, Scura's licensing deal paid him a commission of roughly a dollar for every Gyro Odyssey sold. Freestylin' magazine's October 1986 product feature named Scura as "the mastermind behind the new spinning system," priced the unit at $19, and listed nine color options. It also noted that GT bought the first production shipment, which is why so many 1986 GT Pro Performers shipped with a "gyro patent pending" sticker. Scura's own quotes in Freestyle magazine (August 1987) put the production estimate at the time at roughly half a million Gyros expected to sell that year.

The patent record matches the timeline. Three later U.S. patents in Scura's name cover refinements to the cable-detangler system itself: 5,829,314 (granted November 3, 1998), 6,164,153 (granted December 26, 2000), and 6,205,635 (granted March 27, 2001). After the Odyssey licensing agreement ended, Scura put out an improved version under the name ORYG — "Gyro" spelled backward.

The SST Trick Team

SST was never only a parts company. Scura put together one of the earliest freestyle teams, the SST Trick Team, with Woody Itson, Martin Aparijo, and himself on a bike. Sponsored by GT Bicycles by 1985, the team rode product showcases at local shops and open houses, choreographed routines built to keep kids watching. Scura's own riding came with a list of named tricks. In his 1987 Freestyle interview he claimed authorship of the Gut Lever (worked out with Martin Aparijo), the ScuraTuck, the Scurfer (a one-footed handlebar stand), the Hurricane (an infinity roll with the bars spinning), and the Miami Hopper Overture.

In May 1987 Scura rode the European "Dan'Up" tour alongside Dennis McCoy, Eddie Fiola, Mat Hoffman, Rick Moliterno, Franck Scura, and Bob Haro — a rider lineup that puts Scura on the same bill as some of freestyle's biggest names of the era, not just its equipment man.

The 2025 USA BMX Hall of Fame announcement also credits Scura with two world records for longest wheelie, the second of which clocked in at 2 hours, 57 minutes.

The mentor list

USA BMX's own Hall of Fame copy names the riders Scura tutored personally over the years, several of them now Hall of Famers in their own right: Pete Loncarevich, Greg Hill, Billy Griggs, Woody Itson, Martin Aparijo, Denny Davidow, and Dave Voelker. He also drew up early plans for quarter pipes that ran in BMX Plus! magazine.

USA BMX Hall of Fame — Class of 2025

On June 11, 2025, USA BMX announced the Class of 2025 inductees for the 40th anniversary of the BMX Hall of Fame. Scura was named in the Industry category alongside Mike Poulson (Early Racer), Greg Romero (Racer), Cathy Hanna (Woman), Eddie Roman (Early Freestyle), and Kevin Robinson (Freestyle). The induction weekend ran September 19-21, 2025 at the Hardesty BMX Stadium, just outside the BMX Hall of Fame & Museum at USA BMX headquarters in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The Hall of Fame itself was founded forty years earlier, in 1985, by then-ABA owner Bernie Anderson — and its first three inductees were racers Dave Clinton and Stu Thomsen alongside Linn Kastan, the Redline founder whose chromoly forks and Flight Cranks Scura's own generation of racers grew up on.

Where Brian Scura fits in the bigger story

Two threads run through Scura's career that the BMX industry rarely puts side by side. He was an early example of a working rider who made his living off the product side instead of the contingency side — paid by the Gyro and the Kool Stop, not by the podium. He also belongs to the small handful of inventors whose work changed what was physically possible on a freestyle bike. The Gyro is the clearest of those changes. The 360-degree bar spin was a fight against the cable until 1986, and a non-issue after.

Not to be confused with: S&S (Street & Strip) Performance Products, a separate and unrelated late-1970s Southern California BMX brand — best known as Pete Loncarevich's 1978 amateur sponsor — that has no connection to Scura's Scura Speed & Technology (SST) beyond the coincidence of a similar-sounding abbreviation.

Riders: Scot Breithaupt, Eddie Fiola, Greg Hill, Mike Miranda, Perry Kramer, Pete Loncarevich, R.L. Osborn, Stu Thomsen, Todd Anderson, Tommy Brackens, Denny Davidow, Clint Miller, Jeff Bottema, Damian Fulton, Martin Aparijo, Billy Griggs, Dennis McCoy, Mat Hoffman, Bob Haro. Brands: CW, Diamond Back, GT, Haro, Hoffman, Hutch, JMC, Mongoose, Redline, Schwinn, Skyway, S&M, Torker, Webco, TW BMX, California Racing Designs, Bottema Forks, Hustler, Voris Dixon, Hyper, S&S Performance. Sanctions: BUMS, NBA, NBL, ABA, IBMXF, USA BMX. The bigger arc is in our History of BMX series.

Sources

USA BMX / Bicycle Retailer and Industry News — "USA BMX Announces Inductees For Their 40th Anniversary BMX Hall Of Fame" (Tulsa, OK, June 11, 2025). 23MAG BMX — Brian Scura profile page (23mag.com/gens/scura.htm), sourced to Freestyle August 1987, Freestylin', and jtfreestyle.com. U.S. Patent and Trademark Office records via Justia Patents — design patents D281,140 (Take-a-Brake tool, granted October 29, 1985) and D281,155 (bicycle hub, granted October 29, 1985); utility patents 5,287,765, 5,829,314, 6,164,153, 6,205,635, and 6,968,927. BMXmuseum.com forums — SST, Race Lace, and detangler threads, including the "Brian Scura belongs in HOF" thread on BMX Society. U.S. usabmx.com — official 1985 BMX Hall of Fame founding-class record (Dave Clinton, Stu Thomsen, Linn Kastan). Freestylin' October 1986 (Gyro product release). Freestyle August 1987 (Scura interview). Vintage BMX Ads — "GT PRO PERFORMER — Brian Scura" (October 1986). BikeParts Wiki — "Detangler" entry. Wikipedia — "Billy Griggs" and "Odyssey BMX." ACS Rotor origin credit (created by Steve Potts for Mike Buff, licensed to ACS): Bill Ryan, firsthand, 2026.

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