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Race Inc.

Race Inc. never much bothered building its own brand. Bill Bastian's Southern California shop built frames for other people's brands instead — FMF, Peugeot, Cycle Pro, Laguna, SE Racing — the same aluminum frame wearing five different head badges depending on who was buying the run that month. It's one of the least-known names in early BMX and one of the most important, because half the first-aluminum-frame stories from the late 1970s trace back to Bastian's shop, not the brand on the down tube.

From Kawasaki's pit crew to a BMX frame shop

Bill Bastian came out of motorcycle racing, not bicycles. He tuned bikes for U.S. Suzuki Motors Corp's road race team in 1966, then for American Kawasaki Motors' road race team in 1967. By 1973-74 he was inside Kawasaki's Accessories Division, working under race team manager Darrel Krause as a component engineer and later a soft-goods development specialist. That's where he helped develop Kawasaki's aluminum BMX prototypes — built under contract by Triple A Accessories, run by Marshall Yocum, where Bastian was on staff. He left Triple A and started his own operation around 1973-74, informally at first, then formally incorporated it as Race Inc. — California Business #C0784533, filed July 28, 1976, in Bastian's name.

The RA-7 — the first mass-produced aluminum BMX frame

Race Inc.'s signature model, released in 1976, was the RA-7: a pro-size, 20-inch top tube, TIG-welded 6061-T6 aluminum looptail frame with a distinctive stack-of-dimes weld pattern and diamond dropouts. It's generally credited as the first mass-produced aluminum BMX frame — a real break from the chromoly-steel frames that dominated the category up to that point.

One frame, five brand names

Bastian's shop was, first and foremost, an OEM fabrication house — it built frames to spec for whoever placed the order, and wasn't especially interested in pushing the Race Inc. name itself. The RA-7 platform went out under a run of different labels through the late 1970s: as FMF's Team Replica starting in 1976 (with a junior version, the RA-8, sold as FMF's Jr Pro); as Peugeot's Race 1 MX in 1976-77, later renamed the CPX-500; as Cycle Pro's Spoiler (round top tube) and Foiler (airfoil top tube) in 1977; and as Laguna's GT in 1978. A related frame, Raleigh's Rampar, carried Race Inc.'s characteristic front gusset without being an exact RA-7 clone.

The SE Racing relationship — and the designer dispute

When Scot Breithaupt left FMF to found SE Racing in 1977-78, he contracted Race Inc. to build SE's aluminum frames, a relationship that ran until SE brought aluminum production in-house around 1981-82. Even after that, Race Inc. kept building SE's PK Ripper to spec through much of the 1980s — some PK-style frames went out decaled as Race Inc. and shipped to Europe, and that overlap may have played a part in Race Inc.'s eventual close.

Legend's own FMF chapter already flags an unresolved dispute over who actually designed the RA-7 — Breithaupt or Bastian. What we found here doesn't settle it, but it does trace the RA-7's design lineage back to Bastian's earlier Kawasaki and Triple A prototype work in 1974-75, which predates his relationship with Breithaupt and FMF. That makes Breithaupt, on this record, a customer who started receiving frames to rebrand in 1976 — not proof of who drew the geometry. We're reporting that as sourced context, not as a resolution.

On the gate — the factory team

Race Inc.'s own factory rider was Perry Kramer, who rode for the team from March 1983 to mid-1984, after being dropped by SE Racing following the 1983 ABA Winter Nationals — he rejoined SE once Race Inc. folded. Mickey Lundy managed the team alongside him through that stretch. Earlier on, in the RA-7's first year, Scot Breithaupt and Jeff Utterback rode RA-7 frames to first and third at the 1976 NBA Nationals — but under FMF's banner, not Race Inc.'s own.

The rest of the lineup

Beyond the RA-7, Race Inc. built the RA-8 and RA-9 as junior-size models, the RA-10 in 1983 (an aluminum round-tube frame built as a geometric copy of SE's looptail PK Ripper), and the RA-24 late in 1983 — a 24-inch cruiser and the only model the company ever sold as a complete bike rather than a frame-and-fork set. A pair of chromoly pro frames, the RM-1 and RM-2, are referenced in community sourcing but not confirmed in a primary record we could access; period commentary suggests Race Inc. didn't build in chromoly before the 1981 model year. The company also made its own aluminum handlebars and seatposts from early on, later adding a chromoly bar, the RH-6MC, and its own forks — though whether the forks were built in-house or contracted out isn't settled in what we found.

The close

Race Inc.'s operating history is broadly reported as ending in 1984, a date backed by trade press, Wikipedia's Perry Kramer entry, and detailed community research. One record complicates that: a California Secretary of State filing shows the Race Inc. corporate entity formally dissolved on July 29, 1983 — a full model year and an active factory team before the broadly reported close. We're presenting both dates rather than picking one. Bill Bastian died in 2011.

The Race Inc. name outlived the original company. It resurfaced under an Indiana-based operation, Race Inc. Quality BMX Products, at some point after Bastian's death, then sold in 2020 to American BMX Company, founded by Canadian entrepreneur Marc Côté, which continues selling bikes and frames under the Race Inc. name today. That modern business has no connection to Bastian's 1970s-80s Southern California shop beyond the name.

What we don't know

Whether Race Inc.'s forks were built in-house or contracted to another shop. Whether the RM-1/RM-2 chromoly frames were ever a confirmed production model or a community-attributed variant we couldn't independently verify. And the 1983-vs-1984 closure date — we've reported both rather than resolved it.

Related Legend Bike Co. chapters

FMF BMX · Laguna Distributors · The History of BMX (1970-1995)

Sources

bmxmuseum.com forums — a detailed, magazine-cited house history of Race Inc., citing BMX Action, June 1983; BMX Plus!, October 1983; and Super BMX, October 1982, among others, plus California Secretary of State business-registry research. bicycleretailer.com, "Historic BMX Brand Race Inc. Sold to Canadian Entrepreneur," July 22, 2020. Wikipedia, "Perry Kramer." Legend Bike Co.'s own FMF BMX and Laguna Distributors chapters, cross-referenced for consistency. oldschoolmags.com and bmxsociety.com were checked; a period bike test referencing Race Inc. was located by title on oldschoolmags.com but its content wasn't accessible for verification, and bmxsociety.com's forum threads on Race Inc. and Bill Bastian were found by title but not independently readable at the time of research.