Kevin McNeal

Riverside, California · "The Corona Kid" · 1981 ABA National No. 1 Pro · NBA Mongoose Grand Nationals winner · California State Champion · First sponsored Torker racer · USA BMX National BMX Hall of Fame, Class of 2004

A BMXRacingHistory.com preview · hosted on Legend Bike Co

At a glance

Riverside roots and the Corona downhill

Picture the Inland Empire in the mid-1970s. Riverside, Corona, the towns strung between them — that little pocket of Southern California had more fast BMX kids per square mile than anywhere else in the country. McNeal came up right in the middle of it, and he came up at the front.

The track that made his name was Corona BMX. It had one of the most infamous downhill straights the sport has ever built. The USA BMX Hall of Fame entry says McNeal was "practically unbeatable for 2 straight years" on that downhill, and that run is where the nickname came from — the one that stuck to him for good. The Corona Kid. Period accounts on FatBMX and the bmxsociety threads have him hitting better than 50 mph down the Corona drop, chains wrapped around his mag wheels for extra weight. Read that again. Chains, for weight, at fifty miles an hour.

A December 1976 BMX Action race report places him beating Stu Thomsen and Jeff Bottema at what the magazine frames as a California State Championship-level race on September 5, 1976 — the earliest period sourcing we've found for the state title already credited to him here, cited cautiously since it comes from a single report (oldschoolmags.com, BMX Action, December 1976).

The first Torker MX rider, BMX Action 1977

Torker built its first 20" race frame, the MX, in 1976. The rider who debuted it in print was Kevin McNeal. He was one of the first racers Torker ever sponsored, and he is the one who put the MX in front of the whole sport in the pages of BMX Action Magazine in 1977. That is the moment Torker stopped being a small Fullerton shop and started being a national race brand.

The original MX was built around him. McNeal was a bigger, harder-riding kid than the standard 1976 BMX bike was made for, so the frame got scaled up to fit how he rode. That lineage still runs straight through everything we make. Today's Torker MX26 and MX29 — and the 2026 50-Year Anniversary Big Bike — carry his name forward on purpose.

NBA Mongoose Grand Nationals, California State Champion

Two wins anchor McNeal's Torker chapter. The NBA Mongoose Grand Nationals victory, and the California State BMX Championship. He took the Grand Nationals win on the original 1976 Torker MX, and to my mind no single result did more to make Torker a real factory race brand in the eyes of racers, tracks, and bike shops across the country. People saw that bike win the big one, and the phone started ringing.

RRS and Kuwahara, the years between

Torker wasn't the only bike company using McNeal's saddle time to develop product. BMX Plus!'s June 1981 issue documents him testing RRS prototypes from June 1979 through September 1980, alongside fellow test riders Joe Claveau and Danny Wall (oldschoolmags.com, BMX Plus!, June 1981). He also rode for the Kuwahara National Team — a January 1982 BMX Action feature on the Kuwahara KZ2 refers to him as a former teammate of Kuwahara rider Lee, and a later BMX Plus! retrospective (January 1988) credits McNeal, alongside R.L. Osborn, Frank Post, and Bob "Trash Can" Morgan, with helping Kuwahara develop and introduce the KZ1 in December 1979 (oldschoolmags.com, BMX Action, January 1982; BMX Plus!, January 1988). Those two stretches sit between his Torker debut and his Pro-Neck years, and they show a rider companies kept coming back to for development work, not just results.

1981 ABA National No. 1 Pro

By 1981 he was racing pro, and he took the ABA National No. 1 Pro title that year. He took it in a way that forced the sanctioning body to rewrite its own rules.

The USA BMX Hall of Fame entry says it flat out: McNeal was "the first Pro to wrap up the #1 Pro title before The Grands." He was so far ahead on points that the championship was already decided before the Grand National even ran. That made the Grands a non-event for the title chase. The ABA threw out the old points system after that season.

For winning the 1981 ABA No. 1 Pro plate, McNeal drove home a 1982 Pontiac Trans Am. That was the ABA's headline prize for its top pro back then. A car. For racing a bike.

Period coverage puts numbers on how dominant that season was. BMX Action's May 1982 recap of the National No. 1 Pro honor gives his final tally as 11,765 ABA points, with McNeal himself saying, "I don't think there's anyone out there who could say that at the beginning of the year they didn't want to be ABA No. 1" (oldschoolmags.com, BMX Action, May 1982). He'd already locked up the points lead mid-season — an August 1981 BMX Action race report from Fremont opens with him "heading the AA Pro cash-earners," calling him "pro points leader Kevin McNeal" and noting he got away first off the gate (oldschoolmags.com, BMX Action, August 1981). One more detail from that title run: his Trans Am wasn't even ready in time for the Chandler presentation ceremony where the ABA handed him the plate.

Pro-Neck, video review, and the first Bad Boy

McNeal's longest pro stretch was on Pro-Neck — the Pomona, California brand documented in full on Legend's Pro-Neck history page, where his rider input on the way to the 1981 ABA Professional Championship helped shape the National Pro frame that BMX Plus! road-tested that September. The Hall of Fame entry frames his Pro-Neck-era career two ways, and both of them are firsts.

One was on the bike. After what the USA BMX entry calls "some overly aggressive riding," McNeal caught suspension time from the ABA — the entry tags him "the first controversial 'Bad Boy' of BMX." The 1981 ABA Summernationals run-in with Frank Post in Amarillo is part of that file. Frank Post's own page tells the other side of that specific incident: Post went after McNeal convinced he'd been hit on purpose in the first turn, but BMX Plus!'s own account afterward found the contact was incidental — Greg Hill and McNeal had touched first in that same turn, and McNeal drifted into Post's line as a result. The suspension stuck to McNeal's file regardless of how that one moment actually happened.

The other was off the bike, and honestly it was years ahead of everybody. McNeal was the first pro to use portable video to study his own racing. He had a friend tape every moto, then sat and watched it back between rounds, slow motion, hunting for the mistake so he could fix it before the next gate dropped. The rest of the sport didn't catch on to that for a long time. He also dug cars as much as bikes — a period BMX Plus! aside has him bragging that his 1970 Plymouth Barracuda "will blow any Trans Am off," which reads differently once you know he drove a Trans Am home a season later (oldschoolmags.com, BMX Plus!, 1982).

After racing

After the Pro-Neck years McNeal stepped back from racing full time. Community accounts on bmxmuseum and the Facebook BMX Legend pages put him back in Riverside, running tracks of his own in the years that followed. The 2005 FatBMX item "May 2005: The Corona Kid in bad shape" relayed concerns about his well-being through his brother; the specifics were never independently confirmed anywhere we could find, and we're not going to repeat an unverified account on his page. What's clear from the record is that the BMX community closed ranks around him when the news broke.

What we don't know

His exact NBA rankings across 1977 through 1980 aren't confirmed from a period standings table or race-report archive — they circulate on secondary sources, and we couldn't independently verify them here. The precise date of his California State Championship win is single-sourced to one 1976 race report. What actually happened to him around 2005, beyond the community's concern, was never independently confirmed and we haven't repeated the unverified specifics. None of that changes the shape of the record above; it's just where it runs thin.

Where he fits

Kevin McNeal is one of the foundation racers of American BMX. He debuted the bike that put Torker on the map. He owned the gnarliest downhill track in the sport. He took the 1981 ABA No. 1 Pro plate in a way that broke the points system, and he was studying race video twenty years before the rest of the field figured out they should be doing the same thing.

He raced under ABA and NBA rules in the era before the USA BMX consolidation, alongside the NBL and the international IBMXF. The brand he is most tied to is documented at the Torker Racing history chapter; the bike-shop scene he came up in is in The History of BMX.

Sources

USA BMX National BMX Hall of Fame, "Kevin McNeal" — official entry, Class of 2004 (Racer): usabmx.com/about/hall-of-fame/812. Torker Racing, "Kevin McNeal — The First Torker MX | USA BMX HOF 2004": torkerracing.com/pages/kevin-mcneal. Torker Racing, "The #1 BMX Factory Team in America: Complete Torker Racing History (1977-Present)." BMX Action, "To the Max: The History of Torker 1975-1984" at bmxaction.org. FatBMX, "May 2005: The Corona Kid in bad shape." BMX Society community forum thread on downhill tracks. BMXmuseum.com community threads — "Kevin McNeal, info?" and "Kevin McNeal's 203mm Profile cranks." Bill Ryan supplied the Torker-era context. oldschoolmags.com period scans consulted for this update: BMX Action December 1976 (Sept 1976 race report), BMX Action August 1981 (Fremont race report, points-leader quote), BMX Action May 1982 (National No. 1 Pro recap, exact point total and quote), BMX Plus! June 1981 (RRS prototype testing, 1979-1980), BMX Action January 1982 (Kuwahara KZ2 feature), BMX Plus! January 1988 (Kuwahara KZ1 development retrospective), BMX Plus! 1982 (Plymouth Barracuda aside). Legend Bike Co's own Pro-Neck and Frank Post pages were checked for cross-page consistency. bmxsociety.com was checked via site search and returned no independent results on Kevin McNeal beyond what's already cited.

Spelling note. The correct spelling is Kevin McNeal. The variant "McNeil" appears occasionally in older posts and search engines; the USA BMX Hall of Fame directory, the Torker Racing official rider page, and the FatBMX news archive all use McNeal.