DG Performance — The Anaheim Motocross Company That Signed Bottema, Thomsen, and King (1975 to 1982)

DG Performance — The Anaheim Motocross Company That Signed Bottema, Thomsen, and King (1975 to 1982)

A BMXRacingHistory.com preview · hosted on Legend Bike Co

DG never set out to be a BMX brand. It started as a motorcycle parts shop in Orange County, built by two guys who wanted a better carburetor spacer for a Honda 125. Then one founder's kid started racing BMX on the side, and inside about a year DG had a factory team wearing some of the biggest names in the sport. Six years, one team manager who left to found his own brand, and a second team manager who was still defending the bikes online forty years later. Here's what the record actually shows.

Where it started — a crane man, a Honda dealership, and a carburetor spacer

Gary Harlow ran a crane company before any of this started. His son Kevin raced motocross, and that's how Gary ended up at a Honda dealership talking to a man named Dan. The two of them founded DG Performance Specialties in 1974 in Anaheim, California — the name came straight off their first names, Dan and Gary. About six months in, Gary bought out Dan's half of the business. He kept the DG name on the door anyway.

The first products were small: carburetor spacers and airboxes built for 30mm Mikuni carbs on 125cc Hondas. From there DG expanded into exhaust pipes, swingarms, radial heads, and riding apparel. The company grew fast — a 1,200 square foot shop on Collins Avenue in Orange, then 3,000 square feet on La Palma Avenue in Anaheim, then 10,000 square feet on Van Horn Avenue in Anaheim by 1978. DG's early motocross team carried real names for the era: Bob Hannah and Broc Glover, signed in 1975, along with Davey Williams, Mike Bell, Davey Taylor, Gary Denton, and Dave Eropkin.

A note on spelling. Legend Bike Co.'s own rider chapters — Jeff Bottema, Stu Thomsen, and Eddy King — spell the second founder's name "Dan Hangsleben." Outside sources on the motorcycle side of DG's history spell it "Dan Hangsleven." No source resolves the discrepancy. We're flagging it rather than picking one.

Kevin's other bike — DG gets into BMX

Kevin Harlow didn't just race motocross. He raced BMX too, and that's the reason DG built a BMX line at all — a father backing his son's second sport with the same shop that was already building him motocross parts. The BMX line ran from somewhere around 1975-76 through DG's exit from the category in the early 1980s. Gary Harlow himself, in a 2011 interview looking back on the company, remembered the BMX bikes plainly: "We also had a line of BMX bikes, the DG1 and DG2. Those are real collectable today."

Chuck Robinson builds the team — 1976

In 1976, DG hired Chuck Robinson to run the BMX team. Robinson had already built one factory program from scratch — he'd been hired by Webco in 1972 to go find riders and stand up their BMX effort. At DG he did it again, and did it fast. He signed Jeff Bottema and Stu Thomsen — two of the biggest amateur names racing at the time — and DG's team went from nothing to a real program almost overnight. Eddy King picked up a DG co-sponsorship as an amateur in March 1977, and Clint Miller rode for DG from June through December 1978, in the stretch between his JMC and GJS deals.

Robinson didn't stay long. About a year after joining DG, he left to run the team at LRV in 1977, then struck out on his own — March 1, 1978 is the date he started Robinson Racing Products out of his garage. The line running from Webco to DG to LRV to Robinson to the GT Robinson Division is one of the clearer threads in early Southern California BMX, and DG sits right in the middle of it.

Steve Skibel takes the team over

After Robinson left, Steve Skibel became DG's BMX team manager. His son, Steve Skibel Jr., rode for DG as a kid — both BMX and motocross. Skibel confirmed his own identity directly in a 2017 comment on a DG BMX history site, addressing Jeff Bottema by name and offering to send him DG's old 1977 catalog. Steve Skibel Jr. later died in December 2024; the racing-media tributes at the time described him as a DG amateur rider, though the specifics of his results are not independently confirmed here.

DG's pull on riders extended past its own factory names. Byron Friday — coming off a run at Redline — signed with DG and appeared on the cover of BMX Action in January 1980, racing his DG at Corona Raceway. Byron designed a frame for the brand too: the DG ZF-1, named for DG's two main pro racers of the moment, Sal Zuener and Friday himself ("ZF" for Zuener/Friday). It shipped before DG closed its BMX operation.

The frames

DG's BMX line was built in 4130 chromoly, according to Byron Friday's own recollection of working at the DG shop. Beyond that baseline, the model lineup is documented mostly through owners and racers identifying their own bikes rather than a factory catalog we've been able to verify directly:

  • DG Racer 1 — 20-inch, American bottom bracket, introduced 1976, some versions carrying a cutout DG logo on the front gusset.
  • DG Racer 3 / DG3 — documented on at least one surviving 1977 frame, serial-dated by month and year.
  • DG Super Pro and DG California Pro — the California Pro was a limited-edition run in a black frame with gold rims, remembered by period racers as one of the most wanted DG builds.
  • DG Junior Racer, DG Rooster, and a 16-inch DG Banty — smaller-frame and younger-rider models.
  • DG Green Duck 26-inch cruiser — a low-volume run built late in the company's BMX life, after the Green Duck acquisition.

Production numbers for any individual model are not documented in a factory record we could locate. The few numbers that circulate among collectors — including an estimate from Byron Friday himself, who says he doesn't have a documented count, just his memory of the shop floor — are personal recollection, not verified production figures. We're presenting them as oral history, not fact.

Green Duck, the sale, and the exit from BMX

The Green Duck Corporation acquired DG's BMX manufacturing arm around 1979. Green Duck didn't just build for DG — during that same stretch it was also a contract builder for other brands. Green Duck built the mild-steel SE Basher and the 26-inch OM Flyer for SE Racing, and it welded the frames TW Racing designed but didn't build in-house. That's how the first wave of Southern California BMX brands worked — a handful of contract shops did the actual welding for brands that only drew up the geometry.

DG built its last new BMX bikes around 1981, with the company's BMX operation fully wound down by 1982. On the motorcycle side, Gary Harlow sold the whole company in 1982 as the motorcycle market slumped — the buyers were Bill and Mark Dooley. Gary Harlow died in September 2020.

What we don't know

  • The exact year DG entered BMX. One source puts it at 1975; the pattern across Legend Bike Co.'s own already-published pages consistently uses 1976 for the earliest confirmed team activity. We're presenting it as circa 1975-76 rather than picking a single year.
  • The spelling of co-founder Dan's surname — Hangsleben (used consistently across Legend Bike Co.'s rider pages) versus Hangsleven (used in outside motorcycle-industry sources). Unresolved.
  • Exact production numbers for any DG frame model. Every figure we found traces back to a collector's or former employee's personal memory, not a factory record.
  • Steve Skibel Jr.'s specific DG-era race results and the exact dates of his time on the team. His connection to DG is solid — confirmed by his own father — but his results are not independently verified here.
  • A claim that Profab (Chandler, Arizona) built DG's first-generation frames and forks. This comes from a single unconfirmed forum comment and isn't corroborated anywhere else we found.
  • The content of a "DG Rooster" 1979 bike test reportedly archived on oldschoolmags.com. We confirmed the listing exists by title in the site's index but could not load the page to verify what it says.

Related Legend Bike Co. chapters

Sources

racerxonline.com — "Where Are They Now: DG Performance / Gary Harlow" (January 4, 2011), first-person founder interview. motocrossactionmag.com — "Godspeed, Gary Harlow: DG Performance Specialties Founder" (September 27, 2020), obituary by Jody Weisel with named team roster. dgbmx.wordpress.com — "History of DG," including the comment thread with direct comments from Jeff Bottema (December 3, 2015) and Steve Skibel (October 23, 2017). bmx-catalogue.com — DG company and model summary page. bmxsociety.com — Byron Friday's community profile and post history, first-hand account of working at DG BMX. Legend Bike Co. — Jeff Bottema, Stu Thomsen, Eddy King, Clint Miller, Byron Friday, Robinson Racing, SE Racing, TW Racing, and CRD chapters, cross-referenced for consistency. oldschoolmags.com — PDF archive of BMX Action, BMX Plus!, and Super BMX; DG Rooster (1979) test confirmed by title only, content not verified.