CW Racing started the way several of the best BMX brands did: as a bike shop with a race team, run by someone who cared more about the bikes than the business. Roger Worsham's Coast Wheels shop in Yorba Linda, California was already running a BMX team by 1979. The next year he started building his own frames, and the brand he launched — CW Racing, for "Custom Works" — would spend the 1980s making some of the most visually distinctive racing bikes in BMX. The Phaze 1 Z-Frame, with its unmistakable zigzag seatstay and downtube, is still one of the most recognizable shapes in the history of the sport.

Coast Wheels to CW Racing: 1979–1980

In 1979, Roger Worsham owned and ran Coast Wheels, a bike shop in Yorba Linda — a small town just east of Anaheim in Orange County. The shop sponsored a local BMX team called Coast Wheels Racing. The original Coast Wheels team members included Chris Blackburn, Chris Scott, Tony Swain, and Henry Moreno, with Robert Swick possibly also on the roster.

In 1980, Worsham started a BMX manufacturing operation in Brea, about a 10-minute drive north of the shop. He called it CW Racing. The letters stood for Custom Works. Because Worsham owned both the bike shop and the manufacturer at the same time, a lot of people — then and now — assumed CW stood for Coast Wheels. It never did. As the manufacturing side grew, Worsham sold the Coast Wheels shop and moved his focus entirely to CW Racing. The CW Racing Team was Iconic and included heavy Hitters like Mike "Hollywood" Miranda, Tracer Finn, Billy Griggs, Pistol Pete Loncarevich amongst many other superstars. 

The Phaze 1 and the Z-Frame

CW's signature frame was the Phaze 1, and its defining feature was the Z-shape formed by the seatstay and downtube. Viewed from the side, the rear triangle zigzagged — a look nothing else in BMX had. The design became the brand's visual identity and, by the early 1980s, one of the most recognizable silhouettes in the sport.

The origin of the design has a classic BMX story attached to it. According to BMX Museum community sources, the zigzag frame concept was first sketched on a napkin by a designer at Harbor Lite, a small California builder. An original Harbor Lite prototype exists with serial number 000harborlite, preserved by a collector on Instagram. The design was then added to the CW line and became the Phaze 1 — which is how a napkin sketch ended up defining one of the decade's most collectible BMX frames. Several catalogs and retrospectives describe the Z-frame as "originally created as a joke for a trade show," which is consistent with the napkin story.

Whatever its origin, the Phaze 1 worked. Built in California, made from chromoly steel, with the distinctive rear triangle and aggressive racing geometry, it put CW on the cover of magazines and under fast riders. Collectors today consider the original Phaze 1 a holy grail of 1980s BMX — when they come up for sale without cracked welds, they command serious money.

The product line and the team

CW Racing expanded beyond the Phaze 1 through the 1980s into a full product line: frames, forks, cruiser bars, and eventually components like hubs, pedals, stems, bars, and seat posts. The company's Revcore hub (the name is a play on "rev" and "core") became one of its signature parts, strong enough and well-made enough that when CW reorganized in 1987, the new company took the hub's name and became Revcore.

CW was known for three things in the 1980s scene beyond the frames themselves: hand-crafted California manufacturing at a time when a lot of brands were moving overseas, a strong team of up-and-coming racers, and team uniforms that were among the best-looking in the sport. The brand had a specific visual identity — chrome frames in contrasting colors, loud but not cheap — that made CW riders easy to spot on the track.

As freestyle grew alongside racing through the mid-80s, CW moved into the freestyle side too, making frames for the discipline that was starting to dominate the sport's media coverage.

The Revcore era and the sale: 1987–1989

In 1987, CW Racing folded into and renamed itself Revcore. The new company kept the California manufacturing, kept a lot of the tooling, and kept the distinctive design language — a Revcore-era frame can be identified by the reinforcing sleeve around the seat tube, which became a signature of the post-1987 bikes. The company continued to make frames, forks, and components, now sold under the Revcore name.

The timing matters. 1987 was in the middle of the BMX crash. The whole first-generation BMX industry was contracting. Brands that had boomed from 1978 to 1984 were folding, getting acquired, or quietly scaling down. Renaming and restructuring was one way to survive what killed a lot of other companies.

In 1989, Roger Worsham decided to get out of the bike business entirely. He sold his half of CW Racing/Revcore to Bill Bellis. That's the end of Worsham's direct involvement — from shop owner in 1979 to brand founder in 1980 to fully out by 1989, a ten-year run.

The Bellis years and the 1995 close

Bill Bellis owned CW Racing/Revcore from 1989 until the brand closed in 1995. In February 1991, Bellis authorized Mike Ferriell and Jay Becht to promote the CW brand in California for the 1991–1992 period. That arrangement kept CW visible in the California scene through the worst of the BMX contraction, but the brand didn't expand beyond that footprint.

CW Racing closed down in 1995, the same year a lot of other original-era brands were reaching the end of their runs. By then the sport had moved substantially toward freestyle, the racing side was much smaller than it had been at its 1984 peak, and the second wave of rider-owned brands — S&M, Hoffman, Standard, Supercross — had taken over most of the oxygen on the racing side.

The revival

CW Racing came back in the 2010s. The brand's current owners have leaned into the collector audience that kept the Phaze 1's name alive through the 90s and 2000s — producing Phaze 1 frames in modern 20-inch, 24-inch (cruiser), 26-inch, and 29-inch sizes, all built to keep the original Z-frame geometry intact while using modern tubing, welds, and geometry tweaks that address the original's known weak points.

The original Phaze 1 frames, per longtime collector and builder accounts, had welds at the Z-junctions that were prone to cracking under aggressive riding. The modern versions have addressed that with updated tubing and welding practices. In 2019, CW partnered with OldSchoolBMX.au on a limited "Legend Series" Phaze 1 — 200 frame-and-fork sets, heat-treated, in five colors. In 2024, the brand released a 29-inch version of the Phaze 1 in yellow, black, and red.

The current CW Racing sells through cwracing.com, running the same Z-Frame design that Roger Worsham's shop first put in the catalog more than 40 years ago.

Legacy

CW Racing is a brand that gets remembered mostly because of one frame design. That's not a dismissal — it's actually a compliment. Most BMX brands from the first boom built bikes that looked essentially like every other bike of the era: a diamond frame, chromoly tubing, maybe a gusset here or there. CW made a frame that nobody could mistake for anything else. Forty-five years after the Phaze 1 first appeared, you still can't draw a Z-frame without everyone who sees it thinking "CW."

The brand also sits in an interesting spot in BMX business history: a 10-year owner-operator run under Roger Worsham, a transition to Revcore in the middle of the crash, a second owner for the final six years, a 1995 shutdown, and then a revival that brought the design back after a gap of nearly two decades. That arc — boom, pivot, acquisition, closure, revival — is the arc a lot of 1970s and 80s BMX brands are following now. CW is one of the cleaner examples of how to do it.