DRP Bicycles — Delta Racing Products, the Rarest Frame in the Library (1977 to 1978)
DRP Bicycles — Delta Racing Products, the Rarest Frame in the Library (1977 to 1978)
A BMXRacingHistory.com preview · hosted on Legend Bike Co
This is the thinnest record in this batch of five, and we're not going to dress it up as anything more than it is. DRP — Delta Racing Products — built BMX frames for perhaps two years in the late 1970s, in numbers small enough that the surviving examples can be counted on one hand. No factory catalog survives that we could find. No confirmed founder's name survives either. What does survive is a name, a rough production count, a small team of riders, and a handful of real frames still in collectors' hands.
A brand known mostly by its team
Delta Racing Products — DRP — built BMX frames in California in 1977 and 1978. We haven't found a source that gives a city of manufacture with confidence, though the brand's clearest present-day tie is to Garden Grove, California, where the Davidow family verified a surviving DRP frame still exists. The company's factory team in that window included brothers Denny Davidow and Dirk Davidow, along with riders collector accounts refer to only as "the Mariettis." We have not found a source confirming a connection between that name and any other Marietti active in BMX at the time, so we're not asserting one.
Denny Davidow's own Legend Bike Co. chapter, built from Bill Ryan's first-hand recollection of Davidow's career, independently confirms Delta Racing Products as Davidow's first documented sponsor, dating his start to 1978 — the same first wave of California BMX that produced Scot Breithaupt, Stu Thomsen, and the early SE Racing roster. That's the one piece of DRP's story that two independent sources — a BMXmuseum bike listing and Legend Bike Co.'s own rider research — agree on.
A frame builder known only as "DEMOS"
Collector references attribute the actual frame-building to someone identified only by the nickname "DEMOS." One period characterization, repeated in collector discussion, describes the frames as ahead of the competition in steering head tube angle, seatpost clamp design, and tubing weight — a builder's reputation for doing something genuinely different with the geometry, not just another shop welding up a standard 1977 frame. We're presenting that as a collector's characterization, not an independently verified engineering claim, and we have not found a full legal name behind the "DEMOS" nickname anywhere in the record.
How rare is rare
Production estimates cited in collector circles put the total run at roughly 125 DRP Pro frames. Today, only about three are known to survive, carrying low serial numbers — a #00 frame reported as the very first one built, before the numbering even reached #1, plus documented examples numbered #07 and #08. For comparison, that's a smaller surviving population than almost any other brand in this library — most 1970s BMX brands that got any real distribution left behind hundreds or thousands of frames. DRP left a double handful.
What we don't know
We don't have a confirmed founder's name, only the nickname "DEMOS." We don't have a confirmed city or shop address for DRP's manufacturing, only its present-day tie through a surviving frame to Garden Grove, California. We don't know what became of the company after 1978 — whether it closed outright, was absorbed elsewhere, or simply stopped producing frames as its principal moved on. And we haven't been able to verify the "the Mariettis" team reference against any other source. Given how little of this record we could independently confirm, treat this page as a starting point for further digging, not a finished history — and if anyone in the BMX collector community has a fuller account, it would meaningfully improve on what's here.
DRP and Legend Bike Co.
DRP isn't a Legend Bike Co. brand, and its own record is too thin to claim much for it beyond what's above. But it shares a real, independently confirmed connection to this library through Denny Davidow, a 2003 National BMX Hall of Fame inductee whose own Legend Bike Co. chapter names DRP as the first stop on his career.
Related pages
Denny Davidow · Scot Breithaupt · Stu Thomsen · SE Racing
Sources
BMXmuseum.com — "Delta Racing Products" (DRP) bike listings, including the "1978 Delta Racing Products Denny Davidow" entry, and the associated forums thread discussing production numbers, serial numbers, the "DEMOS" builder attribution, and the Garden Grove frame verification by the Davidow family. Legend Bike Co. — Denny Davidow chapter, built from Bill Ryan's first-hand recollection, independently confirming DRP as Davidow's 1978 sponsor. We searched oldschoolmags.com and bmxsociety.com specifically for DRP material and did not find dedicated coverage beyond the BMXmuseum references already cited above.