FMF BMX — The Flying Machine Factory's One Wild Season Racing BMX (1973 to Today)

FMF BMX — The Flying Machine Factory's One Wild Season Racing BMX (1973 to Today)

A BMXRacingHistory.com preview · hosted on Legend Bike Co

FMF has spent fifty years building motocross exhaust pipes. Somewhere in the middle of that run, for one single BMX season, the company that made Marty Smith's Honda scream also put a bicycle frame under the rider who won the first national pro title BMX ever handed out. That rider was Scot Breithaupt — the man who a few years later hired a twelve-year-old to sweep floors at his new company, SE Racing. Here's how a Southern California exhaust shop ended up in the middle of BMX history for one year, and why it left just as fast as it arrived.

Where it started — Don Emler and the Flying Machine Factory

Don Emler started racing motorcycles in 1967. He wasn't chasing a business, he was chasing lap times, and he modified his own bikes to get them. Other racers noticed the difference and started asking him to work on theirs. By 1973 Emler was spending more time in other guys' engines than his own, so he stopped racing and opened a shop full-time. He set up in Harbor City, California — a corner of the South Bay, the same stretch of Los Angeles County where a lot of early BMX was being ridden and raced at the same time. He called the company the Flying Machine Factory, named after his favorite movie that year, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines. The first sign it would work: Honda of Piqua ordered 40 pipes and sent the money up front.

FMF's real break came in 1974. Former FMF team racer Marty Smith had moved onto the factory Honda team, and the pipe on his 125cc National Championship-winning Elsinore was an FMF. The company built its name on Honda two-strokes through the mid-'70s, then followed the factory action over to Suzuki in 1976 — the same year FMF ran RMs for a young Jeff Ward in his first national season. FMF was, by then, one of the top independent exhaust shops in Southern California motocross. None of that had anything to do with bicycles yet.

FMF gets into BMX — 1976

BMX was exploding in Southern California at the same time FMF was building its name in motocross, and for one model year FMF put its badge on a bicycle. The bike was called the FMF Team Replica, and FMF didn't build it. The frame came from Race Inc., a Southern California contract shop that had started making aluminum prototypes for Kawasaki before striking out on its own. Race Inc.'s RA-7 — released in 1976 — is generally credited as the first mass-produced aluminum BMX frame, and Race Inc. sold that same basic frame under more than one name at once. The RA-7 went out as the FMF Team Replica, as the Peugeot CXP-500, and as the Cycle Pro Spoiler and Foiler — same aluminum frame, different head badge depending who was buying the run.

Building a BMX frame out of aluminum in 1976 was a real risk. Steel frames were snapping at tracks across the country already, and aluminum welds don't forgive mistakes the way steel does. Race Inc.'s answer was gusseting — reinforced plates welded into the head tube, the bottom bracket, and the seat stay junctions, the three spots that took the worst of a hard landing. That gusseting is what let the RA-7 platform survive the abuse of an actual BMX track, and it's the detail collectors still point to first when they talk about why the frame held up.

A surviving 1976 FMF Team Replica shows what the whole package looked like: an aluminum FMF handlebar on a double-gooseneck stem, a Redline fork, Preston Petty Works GP grips, a fluted aluminum seatpost with a Kashimax saddle, Takagi one-piece cranks, Union pedals, and a Bendix coaster brake hub rolling on Araya 7B rims. It was a period-correct, fully kitted-out '76 race bike wearing an exhaust company's name on the down tube.

Scot Breithaupt wins the first NBA #1 Pro plate on an FMF

Here's the part of the story that runs straight into Legend Bike Co.'s own history. In 1976 the National Bicycle Association ran its pro class as an official points title for the first time, and named its first-ever National No. 1 Pro: Scot Breithaupt, 20 years old, riding an FMF Team Replica. Perry Kramer finished second and Jeff Utterback third. Scot had already founded BUMS as a teenager and run the sport's first organized races — winning BMX's first national pro title on an exhaust company's bicycle was one more first added to a résumé that already had several.

It didn't last as a sponsorship, and it didn't need to. In January 1977 Scot registered his own company, Scot Enterprises — SE Racing — and built the PK Ripper, the Quadangle, and a factory team that would define the next decade of BMX. That's the same building on Paramount Boulevard where a twelve-year-old named Bill Ryan started sweeping floors and stickering frames in 1981, and where he'd stay through the years that led to founding Supercross BMX. FMF's one BMX season sits right at the front of that whole chain of events, whether FMF meant it to or not.

Greg Hill's year on FMF, and the pipeline into SE Racing

Scot wasn't the only rider FMF backed. A young Greg Hill — years away from becoming the first IBMXF BMX World Champion — rode for FMF from late 1976 through October 1977, after stints with a Pedals Ready Pro Shop/GT amateur deal and Webco earlier that same year. When Hill's FMF sponsorship ended in October 1977, he didn't sign somewhere else in the exhaust business. He went straight to Scot Enterprises Racing, the company Scot had founded that January. Two riders, one FMF roster, and both of them rolled directly into the brand that would go on to build the PK Ripper. That's not a coincidence worth overselling, but it's not nothing either — FMF's short BMX roster fed straight into the birth of one of the sport's defining companies.

One model year, then back to exhaust pipes

FMF's BMX line was never meant to be a long play. By most accounts it ran a single model year, 1976, with some frames built into the early months of 1977 before the line ended — most Team Replicas share the same layout, though a handful of the later frames added a brake bridge earlier ones didn't have. FMF announced it would not continue its BMX division going into the 1977 season, and that was that. The company went back to doing what it had built its name on in the first place: motocross exhaust systems, developed for the same Southern California pro scene FMF had been serving since 1973.

That decision aged well for FMF. Through the late '70s and into the '80s, the company built a reputation as one of the best independent exhaust shops in motocross, weathered a rough stretch in the '80s when Don Emler briefly lost control of the company, came back under his ownership in 1985, and broke through in 1988 with plated exhaust pipes that didn't rust — a small thing that mattered a lot to weekend racers who hated scrubbing raw steel with a Scotch-Brite pad every weekend. FMF has been a fixture of motocross ever since, right through the two-stroke era and into today's four-stroke market.

FMF today — and the 2008 BMX revival that didn't stick

FMF came back to bicycles once. In 2008, the Kemco Group — a Southern California company — licensed the FMF name to build and sell a line of BMX-branded bikes and parts. When the five-year license term came up in 2013, FMF chose not to renew it. The company wanted to be known as a motorcycle brand again, plain and simple, and that's the business it has run ever since.

FMF today is still family owned and still building everything under one roof, now in Long Beach, California. Don Emler — "Big D" to the people who work for him — is still in the shop most days, and his son Donny Emler Jr. runs marketing and product direction. The company marked 50 years in 2023 and remains one of the biggest names in dirt bike and ATV exhaust anywhere in the world. The BMX chapter is one small season in a much longer motorcycle story, but for one year, an exhaust company's bicycle carried BMX's first national pro plate.

What we don't know

A few details around FMF's BMX year are genuinely unsettled, and we're not guessing at them:

Who actually designed the RA-7. One secondary source ties the RA-7's design to Scot Breithaupt himself, describing it as coming "from the brain of Race Inc. (and later SE Racing's) Scot Breithaupt." BMXmuseum.com's own company history for Race Inc. credits founder Bill Bastian, a former Triple A employee, with starting the company and doesn't mention Scot in that role. We haven't found a primary source that resolves the conflict, so we're not asserting either version as settled fact.

How many FMF Team Replica frames were built. No production numbers turned up in any source we checked. Surviving frames show up in collector circles today, but "how many" remains unknown.

Whether any FMF frames were built in steel. A handful of collector forum posts describe a possible mild-steel FMF Team Replica, distinct from the standard aluminum RA-7 build. We couldn't verify this independently, and the collectors themselves weren't certain. Treat any steel FMF frame as unconfirmed until better documentation turns up.

The exact BMX-division closing date. Sources agree FMF's BMX line was a single model year but describe the tail end slightly differently — one account says frames were built into early 1977 before the division ended; a rider-sponsorship record has FMF's BMX backing running through October 1977. We've presented both without forcing them into one date.

Related Legend Bike Co. chapters

Sources

bmxmuseum.com — FMF brand history page (bikes/fmf), Race Inc. brand history page (bikes/race_inc), and individual 1976 FMF Team Replica listing (bikes/fmf/53969). bmxsociety.com community forum threads "FMF everything, all things Flying Machine Factory" and "What is the SE/FMF/Race Inc connection" (thread content is JavaScript-rendered and did not return through automated fetch; titles and indexed summaries reviewed via search). classiccycleus.com — "1976 FMF Team Replica," Classic Cycle Bainbridge museum entry with full parts spec. Wikipedia: "Gregory Hill (BMX)" (sponsor chronology, FMF Late 1976–October 1977). AMA Motorcycle Hall of Fame — Don Emler Sr. induction page (2017). Dirt Rider Magazine — "FMF Factory Tour" by Pete Peterson (February 2011), Harbor City origin and Marty Smith/Honda Elsinore detail. Motocross Action Magazine — "Big Thinker: Pioneer–Donnie Emler." Vital MX — "My Dad Was Going to the Races...To Let Marty Smith Use His Bike," Donny Emler Jr. interview (August 2022). fmfracing.com — official "About" page. Legend Bike Co. — Scot Breithaupt, The NBA, SE Racing, and Greg Hill chapters (existing, previously published pages, cross-checked for the 1976 NBA No. 1 Pro plate and the FMF-to-SE rider pipeline).