CW Racing

Picture the Phaze 1 for a second. That zigzag rear end, the way the seatstay and downtube cut back on themselves. You've seen it. Everybody who's been near a BMX track has seen it. And the second you draw that shape, your brain says CW. One frame did that. CW Racing came up the way a lot of the good ones did — a bike shop with a race team, run by a guy who cared about the bikes a whole lot more than he cared about running a business. Roger Worsham had a shop called Coast Wheels in Yorba Linda, California, and he had a team going by 1979. Year after, he started welding up his own frames. What he built from there spent the whole 1980s putting out some of the best-looking race bikes anyone made.

Coast Wheels to CW Racing: 1979–1980

Back up to 1979. Roger Worsham owned Coast Wheels, a bike shop in Yorba Linda — little town just east of Anaheim, out in Orange County. The shop backed a local team, Coast Wheels Racing. Early roster was Chris Blackburn, Chris Scott, Tony Swain, and Henry Moreno, and Robert Swick was probably in there too.

In 1980 Worsham set up a manufacturing operation in Brea, ten minutes up the road from the shop. Called it CW Racing. Those letters stood for Custom Works. Here's the thing that trips people up: he owned the shop and the factory at the same time, so half the sport figured CW meant Coast Wheels. Still does, honestly. It never did. As the manufacturing side took off, he let the Coast Wheels shop go and put everything into CW. And that team got loaded. Heavy hitters — Mike "Hollywood" Miranda, Tracer Finn, Billy Griggs, Pistol Pete Loncarevich, and a long line of others who could flat-out go.

The Phaze 1 and the Z-Frame

The Phaze 1 was the frame, and the Z was the whole thing. Look at it from the side and the rear triangle zigzags — seatstay and downtube doing something nobody else in BMX was doing. That shape became the brand. By the early 80s it was one of the few silhouettes you could pick out from across the track without reading a single decal.

And the way the design came about is pure BMX. Story goes — and the BMX Museum crowd backs this up — somebody at a small California builder called Harbor Lite sketched the zigzag on a napkin. There's an original Harbor Lite prototype still around, serial number 000harborlite, a collector's got it documented on Instagram. From there the shape made its way into the CW line and became the Phaze 1. A napkin sketch turned into one of the most collectible frames of the decade. Catalogs and write-ups over the years say the Z-frame started out as a joke for a trade show, which lines right up with the napkin.

However it got born, it flat worked. California-built, chromoly steel, that rear triangle, real race geometry. It put CW on magazine covers and under fast kids. Ask a collector now and the original Phaze 1 is a holy grail — one shows up without cracked welds, people pay real money.

The product line and the team

CW didn't stop at the Phaze 1. Through the 80s it grew into a real line — frames, forks, cruiser bars, and then the parts: hubs, pedals, stems, bars, seat posts. Some of that early fork work was contract-built: Roger Worsham had Voris Dixon's VDC shop in Santa Ana bend CW's oval-tube forks after he spotted the design sitting on VDC's own shop floor (Bill Ryan, firsthand, 2026). The Revcore hub stood out. Name's a play on rev and core, and the thing was built well enough that when CW reorganized in 1988, the whole company took the hub's name and became Revcore. Your hub gives the company its new name — that tells you something about the part.

What people remember about CW in the 80s went past the frames. California hand-building at a time when plenty of brands were shipping the work overseas. A team full of young racers on the way up. And uniforms that were just about the sharpest in the sport. CW had a look — chrome frames in contrast colors, loud but never cheap-looking — and you could spot a CW rider on the track from a long way off.

When freestyle started growing up next to racing in the mid-80s, CW went there too, building frames for the side of the sport that was about to own all the magazine pages.

Riteway, the Revcore rename, and the sale: 1987–1989

The distributor went first. In 1987, GT Bicycles bought Riteway Distribution — the outfit that had been getting CW's product into dealers — and CW lost its main distributor right along with it (Bill Ryan, firsthand, 2026).

That landed in the gut of the BMX crash. The whole first wave of the industry was shrinking. Brands that caught fire from 1978 to 1984 were folding, getting bought, or quietly winding down. Renaming and restructuring was one way to ride out the thing that took down a lot of other companies.

The year after, in 1988, CW folded into itself and came back out as Revcore. Same California manufacturing, a lot of the same tooling, the same design language. You can tell a Revcore-era frame by the reinforcing sleeve around the seat tube — that's the tell on the post-1988 bikes. Frames, forks, components, all of it kept rolling, just under the Revcore name now. Bill Ryan settled the two dates in 2026: the Riteway purchase was 1987, the Revcore rename was 1988. A year apart, in that order.

Then in 1989 Worsham was done with bikes. Sold his half of CW Racing/Revcore to Bill Bellis and walked. That's the end of his run with it — shop owner in 1979, brand founder in 1980, fully out by 1989. Ten years, start to finish.

The Bellis years and the 1995 close

Bill Bellis ran CW Racing/Revcore from 1989 until it closed in 1995. February of 1991, Bellis brought in Mike Ferriell and Jay Becht to push the CW brand in California through the 1991–1992 stretch. That kept CW out in front of the California scene through the worst of the slide, but it never grew past that. Stayed a California thing.

CW shut down in 1995, same year a bunch of the original-era brands were hitting the end of the road. By then the sport had tilted hard toward freestyle, the racing side was a fraction of what it had been at the 1984 peak, and the second wave of rider-owned brands — S&M, Hoffman, Standard, Supercross — had taken most of the air on the race side.

Bill Ryan has a firsthand postscript on how that inventory went out the door: when CW and Revcore closed in the bankruptcy, Dennis at El Monte Cycle bought all of it — every piece of CW and Revcore stock left standing — and for years afterward it hung from the shop's ceiling.

The revival

CW Racing came back in the 2010s. The owners now have read the room right — they went straight at the collectors who kept the Phaze 1 alive all through the 90s and 2000s. They're building Phaze 1 frames in 20-inch, 24-inch cruiser, 26-inch, and 29-inch, all holding the original Z-frame geometry while modern tubing and welds clean up the spots the old one had trouble with.

And there were trouble spots. Longtime collectors and builders will tell you the original Phaze 1 welds at the Z-junctions liked to crack if you rode it hard. The new ones fix that with better tubing and welding. In 2019, CW teamed with OldSchoolBMX.au on a limited Legend Series Phaze 1 — 200 frame-and-fork sets, heat-treated, five colors. In 2024 they dropped a 29-inch Phaze 1 in yellow, black, and red.

Today's CW Racing sells through cwracing.com, running the same Z-Frame that came out of Roger Worsham's shop more than 40 years back. Same shape. Still works.

Legacy

CW Racing gets remembered for one frame. That's not a knock — it's a compliment, and a big one. Most brands from the first boom built bikes that looked like every other bike out there: diamond frame, chromoly tubing, maybe a gusset thrown in. CW built something you couldn't mistake for anything else on the planet. Forty-five years after the Phaze 1 showed up, you still can't draw a Z-frame without everybody in the room thinking CW. Think about that.

The brand also sits in a spot worth noting in the business side of BMX. Ten years owner-operated under Roger Worsham. A switch to Revcore right in the teeth of the crash. A second owner for the last six years. Shut down in 1995. Then a revival that brought the design back after damn near two decades gone. Boom, pivot, sale, close, comeback — that's the arc a whole lot of 70s and 80s BMX brands are living through right now. CW's one of the cleaner ways it's been done.

Related chapters

• Revcore — what CW Racing renamed itself in 1988, and where the company's story runs on to 1995
• Hutch — backed by Bill Bellis, the man who ended up owning CW
• GT Bicycles — bought Riteway Distribution in 1987 and cost CW its way into dealers
• Riteway Distribution — the distributor itself, and what the sale did downstream
• Pistol Pete Loncarevich — CW factory rider, late 1983 to 1986
• Mike Buff — on the CW freestyle side in 1986
• Bill Ryan — firsthand source for the Riteway, VDC fork and El Monte Cycle details on this page

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