Cook Bros. Racing — The Santa Ana Machine Shop That Out-Engineered BMX (1972 to Today)
A BMXRacingHistory.com preview · hosted on Legend Bike Co
Most early BMX brands started with a welder and a frame jig. Cook Bros. Racing started with a machine shop that had already cut parts for Can-Am and Indy Car teams. That difference shows up everywhere in the company's history — in the machined cranks, a threadless stem years ahead of its time, and a letter to BMX Action telling the magazine, in no uncertain terms, that Cook Bros. was in the racing business, not the stunt business.
From Indy Car fabrication to a Santa Ana bike shop
Gary Cook was born in Los Angeles in 1938. After a stint in the Air Force, he worked quality control at Cervonics Instruments, then spent 1963-64 building dragsters with his brother Don, Jeff Jahns, and Pete Hedges. That hobby turned into a job: fabricating Can-Am and Indy Car parts for Carl Haas and Roger Penske's race teams.
His younger brother Craig came up through the same world of Southern California car, boat, and dragster racing that ran in the Cook family for three generations. Craig graduated college with an Industrial Arts degree in 1972, and that same year the brothers started Cook Bros. Racing out of Santa Ana, California.
Machined parts in a welded-frame world
Cook Bros. built chromoly BMX frames and forks, but the parts business is what set the company apart. Headsets, hubs, bottom brackets, cranksets, seatposts, and handlebars — all cut on the company's own CNC machines rather than bought as stock components from an outside supplier. That in-house machining is why collectors still call Cook Bros. one of the first "high-quality precision" part makers in BMX.
The best-known product was the Uni-Clamp stem — a clamp-on, threadless design that did the job the "Aheadset" system would later standardize across the whole bicycle industry, years before that system caught on. BMX Action ran a product analysis of the Uni-Clamp in its September 1980 issue, and BMX Plus! photographed a similar Cook Bros. clamp system in its May 1980 issue. Cook Bros. also built in chain tensioners before most of the field, and the brothers later held two United States patents for their component designs.
The brothers weren't shy about where they stood on what BMX was for. In a letter BMX Action ran in its July 1980 issue, responding to a feature on skatepark rider Tinker Juarez, Gary and Craig Cook wrote plainly: "Cook Bros. does not condone stunt riding with BMX equipment. Our effort in the BMX field is RACING, not circus acts... Let's get back to racing and leave the clowning around to the circus." Whatever you make of the opinion, it tells you exactly what kind of company this was — a racing shop, full stop, at a moment when freestyle was just starting to pull the sport in a different direction.
The team and the riders
Cook Bros. ran sponsorships alongside its parts business through the late 1970s and early 1980s. Pete Loncarevich rode for Cook Bros. in 1977 as a 12-year-old amateur — his first sponsor, according to the sponsor-chain timeline on Legend Bike Co.'s own Pete Loncarevich page — before he moved on to S&S Performance in 1978 and then TW Racing in December 1979. Dennis Dain, primarily sponsored by Ralph's Bicycles, carried a Cook Bros. co-sponsorship in 1978. The 1980-81 catalog years also produced a run of Cook Bros. Racing "pit bikes" — six were reportedly built in 1981, with four known to survive among collectors today, though that production number comes from community record-keeping rather than a factory document.
Into mountain bikes
Cook Bros. didn't stay confined to BMX. The company built one of the earliest mountain bikes anywhere, the Cook Bros. Alpine — a bike significant enough that it's on permanent display in the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame in Crested Butte, Colorado. That crossover between BMX and mountain bike engineering wasn't unusual for the era's machine shops, but Cook Bros. took it further than most, and the mountain bike side of the business ended up outliving the BMX side by more than a decade.
The sale, the split, and CQP
Gary sold his half of Cook Bros. Racing to Craig in the early 1980s. Craig then sold the whole company to a new owner, Jack Witmer, in what different sources place at either 1983 or 1984. A dispute between the parties — reportedly over payment — led to Gary's non-compete clause being voided, and Gary went back into the parts business on his own, launching CQP (Cook's Quality Parts) a few years later with his son Bob. CQP built a two-speed system for BMX along with cranks and complete bikes, and by most accounts used designs similar or identical to the ones Gary had built at Cook Bros. Gary ran CQP until 1993, when he sold it and stepped back.
Craig, meanwhile, started his own new venture in 1987 — C.D. Products, building mountain bike frame sets — before later moving into the golf equipment business as owner of Golf Instruments Co.
Under Jack Witmer's ownership, the Cook Bros. Racing name kept going well past the BMX boom. Company catalogs and ads from 1985 through at least 1997 show the brand still selling machined cranksets — the CBR, RSR, Hyper-C, PCH, and "E" series — mostly aimed at the mountain bike and road markets by the 1990s. BMXmuseum.com dates the brand's active run at 1976 to 2005, a window that reflects this long tail in components more than the company's actual 1972 founding.
Gary Cook's death and the brothers' legacy
Gary Cook died in April 2013 at age 74. His obituary in Bicycle Retailer and Industry News credits both brothers with inductions into the BMX Hall of Fame and the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame "for their pioneering efforts in designing and manufacturing products that helped both sports develop and prosper from their earliest beginnings." He was survived by his wife Kay, children Kathryn, Lori, Bob, and Jeff, and his brother Craig, who by then was running a machine shop serving the aerospace and golf industries.
The name today
The Cook Bros. Racing name is now owned by American BMX Company (ABC), a Montreal-based outfit run by Marc Côté. Earlier the same year, ABC bought the rights to two other 1980s BMX brands, Race Inc. Quality BMX Products and Bottema Forks, before adding Cook Bros. Racing to the lineup. ABC builds "Neo Retro" Cook Bros.-branded parts today — handlebars, stems, seatclamps, headsets, and cranks — sold through cookbrosracing.com and the ABC storefront at abmxcorp.com. It's not the original machine shop, but it's the same name, on the same kind of precision parts, carrying forward a reputation the Cook brothers built by machining what other brands just bought off a shelf.
What we don't know
- The exact year BMX products entered the Cook Bros. lineup. The company itself was founded in 1972, but BMXmuseum.com dates the brand's active BMX years at 1976-2005. We haven't found a source that explains the gap between the 1972 founding and the 1976 start date.
- The exact year Craig Cook sold the company to Jack Witmer. Bicycle Retailer's 2013 obituary for Gary Cook says 1984; a separate collector history (MOMBAT) guesses 1983. We're presenting it as circa 1983-84 rather than picking one.
- Production numbers for the 1981 Cook Bros. pit bikes. Community sources put the run at six bikes, four known survivors. That's collector record-keeping, not a factory document.
- The specific BMX Hall of Fame and Mountain Bike Hall of Fame induction years for Gary and Craig Cook. Their obituary references both inductions without dates, and we haven't located a primary Hall of Fame record confirming the year for either.
- Whether CQP's designs were identical to or merely similar to the original Cook Bros. parts. Sources describe them as "similar/identical" without settling the question, which is presumably why the non-compete dispute happened in the first place.
Sources
Bicycle Retailer and Industry News — "BMX and mountain bike pioneer Gary Cook dies," April 1, 2013 (obituary, primary industry-press source with Gary Cook's biography and the company's founding, sale, and CQP history). MOMBAT (mombatbicycles.com) — "Cook Brothers Racing History," a collector-maintained year-by-year catalog and ad archive running 1978 through 1997, including Golf Instruments Co.'s own company history for Craig Cook. 23mag.com — Cook Bros. company page, including the July 1980 BMX Action letter and the September 1980 BMX Action Uni-Clamp product analysis, sourced in turn from fatbmx.com, vintagebmx.com, ababmx.com, and bmxmuseum.com. bmxmuseum.com — Cook Bros. Racing brand page (dated 1976-2005) and bike listings. bmxsociety.com community forums — "Let's have a Cook Bros info thread," "1981 Cook Bros. Racing six produced," and "1978 Dennis Dain Cook Bros. Racing," for team-rider and limited-production detail (community record-keeping, disclosed as such). oldschoolmags.com — bike test archive listing Cook Bros. (1978) and Cook Bros. mini (1981) tests. fatbmx.com — "American BMX Company and Cook Bros. Racing," on the modern acquisition of the brand name by American BMX Company. abmxcorp.com — current Cook Bros. Racing product line under American BMX Company. Legend Bike Co. — Pete Loncarevich, S&S Performance, and TW Racing chapters, cross-referenced for the 1977 Cook Bros. sponsorship.