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

CRD — California Racing Designs

The Clint Miller frame brand — what the record actually shows

We are telling this story the same way we told the SE Racing chapter, the JMC chapter, and the History of BMX: neutrally. CRD is one of those cases where the record is genuinely thin. Read this page with that in mind.

The name, first

CRD stands for California Racing Designs. A short three-letter brand mark for a small Southern California BMX frame operation.

The Clint Miller attribution

CRD is associated within the old-school BMX community with Clint Miller — the Pomona, California pro whose racing career ran from the mid-1970s into 1986. Miller's sponsor list runs through six factory programs: JMC Racing Equipment (1976–1978), D.G. Performance Specialties (mid 1978), GJS So. Cal (late 1978–1979), Torker (1979–1982), Kuwahara (1983–1984), Cycle Pro / GHP (late 1984), and CW Racing (1985–86).

Miller won the 1983 IBMXF Pro World Championship and was inducted into the ABA BMX Hall of Fame in 2005. He is part of the JMC production-record history too — Jim Melton's serial-number log shows Clint Miller received JMC20, the first production Long Standard, dated June 15, 1977.

What the published record does not show, as far as we have been able to verify: a dated magazine ad, factory-team announcement, or product review naming Clint Miller as the founder of CRD / California Racing Designs. The link from Miller to the brand is widely repeated in collector circles, and we are publishing it here as community attribution. If a reader can point us to a 1980s BMX Plus, BMX Action, or Super BMX page that names the founder or shows a CRD ad with date and model line, we will update this chapter with the citation.

What CRD made

BMX race frames and parts, sold into the Southern California market — that is the short answer that the community record supports. Specific tubing specs, frame model names, fork details, color schemes, year-by-year production runs: we do not have those nailed down to a magazine cite at the moment.

That is not unusual for a small brand of the era. Plenty of Southern California shops cut their own frames in the early-to-mid 1980s, ran a quarter-page ad once or twice in a regional magazine, and were gone by the time the BMX boom contracted in 1986 to 1988.

Where CRD sits in the era

The 1980s Southern California BMX manufacturer scene was crowded. The dominant names — Redline, Mongoose, GT, Haro, SE Racing, Torker, JMC, Hutch, Diamond Back, CW Racing, Skyway, Schwinn, Webco — all ran national factory programs and national magazine campaigns. Underneath that tier sat a long list of smaller brands building regional inventory, often through the same handful of contract frame builders that supplied the bigger names.

What we are asking the community to fill in

• The year CRD started and the year it stopped
• The frame model line — name(s), tubing, geometry, weight
• Whether CRD was built in-house or contract-built, and by whom
• Any factory team riders beyond Clint Miller
• Magazine ads — issue, page, scan or photo
• An original CRD frame in collector hands with serial information

Sources

Wikipedia — Clint Miller (BMX racer); sponsorship and career-record summary cited to BMX Plus! June 1982, Super BMX June 1984, Super BMX & Freestyle December 1985 and January 1986. Legend Bike Co. — JMC Racing page, including the JMC Production Breakdown showing Clint Miller as recipient of serial JMC20 on June 15, 1977. BMXmuseum.com — brand pages and forum threads; no dedicated CRD brand page located at the time of writing. oldschoolmags.com — archived PDF scans of BMX Action, BMX Plus!, and Super BMX, 1982 to 1988; no CRD ad or product review surfaced.

Last reviewed: June 2026. This chapter will be updated as additional source material becomes available.