Mike Devitt

SE Racing's Restart, the Long PK, and Alliant

A Legend Bike Co. founder profile · primary source: Bill Ryan, firsthand, 2026

At a glance

Role Production lead, SE Racing (multiple eras); ran SE's late-1980s restart
Scene Long Beach, California, late 1980s
Built The Long PK (stretched PK Ripper, for Brian Lopes) and the Long Quad (stretched Quadangle, for Billy Harrison)
Commissioned The SE Assassin, designed by Bill Ryan
Later Co-founder, Alliant, with Gary Turner
Recognition USA BMX Hall of Fame

Mike Devitt was one of the people SE Racing was built on. He is confirmed, firsthand, by Bill Ryan in 2026 as the "Mike at SE" from the story Bill has told for years about the SE Assassin — the man who ran SE's late-1980s restart out of the back of a Long Beach warehouse, built two stretched frames with names of their own, and, when one of them flexed too much, ended up with Bill's Assassin design in his hands instead. This page leans heavily on Bill's account because he was in the room. Where the public record adds independent detail, it's cited plainly below, and what isn't known is boxed off rather than guessed at.

Running SE's late-1980s restart

By the mid-to-late 1980s, SE Racing had gone under once already in the industry-wide BMX bust, and the brand tried to come back out of a storage warehouse in Long Beach. Bill Ryan dates that restart to "1988, I believe" — he holds the year loosely, and so does this page, because the surrounding record (Bill's own telling has run 1986-87 in one place and 1989 in another over the years) doesn't pin it down harder than that. What's settled now, per Bill firsthand, is that it was one restart, not two, and that Mike Devitt was the man running it.

Bill was running his own TECH Racing Team at the time and went to Devitt at SE looking for bikes for his riders. That's where the rest of this story comes from.

The Long PK and the Long Quad

At that Long Beach restart, Devitt built two stretched frames, and — new detail, per Bill in 2026 — both of them had names. He stretched a PK Ripper for Brian Lopes and called it the Long PK. It worked great — long wheelbase, more room to move, and Lopes rode it well on his way to turning pro in 1989.

He also stretched a Quadangle for Billy Harrison and called it the Long Quad. That one didn't work as well — it flexed more than the team wanted. The Long Quad's flex is the direct reason the next frame in this story exists.

Commissioning the Assassin

Watching the Long Quad flex under Harrison is what put Bill Ryan and Devitt in a room together drawing up something stiffer. Bill designed the SE Assassin — a straight-tube race frame built around Quadangle dropouts and rear stays, one of SE's first straight-tube race frames — and brought it to Devitt. Harrison rode the prototype and loved it. Bill asked Devitt to build Assassins for the whole TECH team; SE couldn't do it at the volume Bill needed, and that shortfall is what pushed Bill to found Supercross BMX in 1989.

Independent of Bill's account, USA BMX's own Hall of Fame biography of Devitt separately credits him as "builder and co-designer" of the SE Assassin, alongside the PK Ripper, Quadangle, and Floval Flyer. The two accounts aren't in conflict — Bill designed it and brought it to Devitt, who ran SE's production floor and built it. Between the two, this page treats Bill's account of the design credit as the primary one, since he was the one at the drafting table.

Before the restart: SE's first decade

The public record — chiefly a 2001 interview Devitt gave to Bill Curtin of VintageBMX.com — fills in a much longer history than the Assassin story alone suggests. Devitt had been in BMX since the sport's earliest days, running the Bike-ette Moto-X team out of his own bike-parts business, then co-founding Dirtmaster with Bob Phillips. Dirtmaster's riders — Bobby Watts, David Clinton, and Stu Thomsen — swept all three classes at the 1974 Yamaha Gold Cup final at the Los Angeles Coliseum, a result Sports Illustrated covered at the time. Devitt also did contract marketing work on Dan Gurney's All American BMX line for Tommy Kamifuji in 1975, and ran Makaha, a skateboard company producing roughly 7,000 boards a day at its peak.

By Devitt's own account, when Scot Breithaupt started SE Racing in 1977, the financing came from Scot's mother, his father — and Mike Devitt. Devitt served as SE's vice president under Breithaupt's presidency, and as Breithaupt's day-to-day involvement in the company faded through the mid-1980s, Devitt became, in his own words, "the mainstay" — the person who kept SE's production running across its multiple restarts and ownership changes, including a stretch in the late 1980s when he ran the company out of his own garage.

Alliant, with Gary Turner

SE went through a further restart in the early 1990s under new investors, and Devitt has said he stepped away from the company in September 2000. According to his own account, he and Gary Turner — the co-founder of GT Bicycles, who had bought SE's original equipment out of the 6801 Paramount Boulevard building years earlier — first tried to buy SE Racing outright from its owners. The offer was turned down, so the two of them built their own company instead: Alliant, producing BMX frames, forks, and handlebars under the Dirt Master, Axxis, and Radix names through the early 2000s. Devitt left Alliant in early 2005, and Turner dropped the Alliant name shortly after.

Where the public record runs thin

Devitt's full birth details, hometown, and life outside BMX are not documented in the sources checked for this page. What he did in the years between leaving Alliant in 2005 and his death is not documented here either. USA BMX's Hall of Fame biography and bmxultra.com both confirm he was inducted into the USA BMX Hall of Fame and that he passed away in May 2020 — bmxultra.com's notice, dated May 11, 2020, reports the news came "over the weekend," which places his death around May 9-10, 2020 — but neither source gives a cause or a fuller obituary, and none was found elsewhere.

One honest wrinkle worth flagging rather than smoothing over: in his own 2001 interview, Devitt describes redesigning SE's product line — including, in his words, "the Assassin" — during the early-1990s ownership period under Taiwan-based investors, a different window than Bill Ryan's dating of the Assassin to the late-1980s Long Beach restart. This page has not reconciled the two tellings. Bill's firsthand account is the primary source for the Assassin story on this site; Devitt's own recollection, given in passing during a wide-ranging interview about SE's whole history, is included here for the record rather than treated as a correction.

Where Mike Devitt fits in the bigger story

Brands: SE Racing, Alliant. People: Bill Ryan, Brian Lopes, Billy Harrison, Perry Kramer, Scot Breithaupt. The bigger arc is in the BMX Family Tree and our History of BMX series.

Sources

Bill Ryan, founder of Supercross BMX — firsthand confirmation (2026) that "Mike at SE" is Mike Devitt, that SE's mid-to-late-1980s Long Beach restart was one restart rather than two, and the Long PK / Long Quad names, as published on his own Legend Bike Co. page and the SE Racing chapter. Bill Curtin, interview with Mike Devitt, VintageBMX.com (2001), republished as "The History of SE Racing as told by Mike Devitt" by BMX Products USA — Devitt's own account of Bike-ette, Dirtmaster, the 1974 Yamaha Gold Cup, Dan Gurney All American BMX, Makaha, financing Scot Breithaupt's 1977 SE Racing startup, his VP role, and the founding of Alliant with Gary Turner. USA BMX Hall of Fame biography (usabmx.com) — Devitt's Hall of Fame recognition and independent credit as builder and co-designer of the SE Quadangle, PK Ripper, Floval Flyer, and SE Assassin. bmxultra.com, "RIP Mike Devitt" (May 11, 2020) — confirms his passing and USA BMX Hall of Fame status. bmxmuseum.com forum, "R.I.P. Mike Devitt..true BMX pioneer," and bmxsociety.com's "Mike Devitt, BMX Icons Interview" thread were checked as supporting sources; oldschoolmags.com and bmxsociety.com were searched first per this library's standing research order, and the VintageBMX.com interview and USA BMX Hall of Fame bio were the strongest independent sources found beyond Bill's own account.