Raleigh — The British Giant's BMX Chapter, From the Burner to Bottema (1979 to 1988)
Raleigh — The British Giant's BMX Chapter, From the Burner to Bottema (1979 to 1988)
A BMXRacingHistory.com preview · hosted on Legend Bike Co
Raleigh had been building bicycles since 1885 and had, at one point, been the biggest bicycle manufacturer on earth. None of that size made it fast into BMX. Its American arm signed a factory team in 1979 and pulled the plug eighteen months later. Its home market didn't get a proper BMX range until 1982, years after Southern California kids had already built an industry out of the sport. But when Raleigh did commit, on both sides of the Atlantic, it left a real mark — a Hall of Fame American racer's name in its catalog, and in Britain, a blue-and-yellow bike that a whole generation still points to as their first BMX.
A century of bicycles before a single BMX frame
Raleigh's story starts in 1885, when Richard Woodhead and Paul Angois opened a small bicycle workshop on Raleigh Street in Nottingham, England. Frank Bowden bought into the business in December 1888 and built it into the Raleigh Cycle Company; by 1913 it was the largest bicycle manufacturer in the world. Raleigh built motorcycles and three-wheel cars through the 1920s and 1930s — a departure that spun off the parts and the name that became Reliant Motors — then settled back into bicycles, moped, and later road-racing sponsorship, most famously the TI–Raleigh professional cycling team that won the 1980 Tour de France with Joop Zoetemelk. By 1976, Raleigh had also launched the Grifter, a chunky off-road-styled bike that wasn't a true BMX but pointed straight at where the market was heading.
Given that history, Raleigh was a strange company to be late to a dirt-bike craze built by teenagers in garages. But that's exactly what happened, on both sides of the Atlantic, in two chapters that ran almost entirely independent of each other.
The U.S. team: Bottema, Henderson, and a name in the catalog — 1979 to 1981
Raleigh Cycle Company of America wanted a BMX presence, and the door opened through Chuck Robinson, who put two of the sport's rising names forward: Jeff Bottema and Toby Henderson. Raleigh signed them both in July 1979. It was Bottema's most visible run as a pro — NBA pro finals across the circuit, a Jeff Bottema signature-series frame in Raleigh's own catalog, and BMX Action covers in November 1979 and December 1981. In 1980, Bottema and Henderson became two of the first American BMX racers invited to Europe to promote and demonstrate the sport — riding Raleigh bikes to European crowds who, at that point, barely had a BMX scene of their own yet.
Raleigh shut the U.S. team down in mid-January 1981. It would restart the program roughly a year later — the same window in which Raleigh's UK operation was finally getting its own BMX range onto showroom floors.
The Huffy years — 1982 onward
In 1982, the Huffy Corporation purchased the rights to the Raleigh USA name after decades as Raleigh of England's American distributor. Under the deal, Raleigh licensed Huffy to design and distribute Raleigh-branded bicycles across the U.S., and the renamed Raleigh Cycle Company of America sold under that license from then on, with production increasingly shifted overseas. It's a corporate detail, not a BMX one, but it explains why the brand that signed Bottema in 1979 looked structurally different by the time BMX's American boom peaked a couple of years later.
The Burner: Britain's BMX, starting 1982
Raleigh didn't get a proper BMX range onto UK shelves until early 1982 — years behind the American brands that had already built factory teams and national magazines around the sport. When it arrived, it arrived as the Raleigh Burner, split across a run of trim levels: the basic Burner, the Tuff Burner (with yellow five-spoke Skyway Tuff II mag wheels), the gold-finished Super Burner, the alloy-heavy Ultra Burner, and the top-tier Pro Burner in a full chromoly frame, fork, and handlebars. A basic Burner retailed for around £120 in 1982; the range-topping Pro Burner ran closer to £225. Later Mk2 versions moved to oval-profile tubing and a cut-out "R" in the dropouts. The name ran through 1988, and Raleigh has revived it in limited anniversary runs since the 2000s.
What the Burner had that most first-wave American brands didn't was Raleigh's own retail network — the shops, the trust, the parents who already knew the name. One longtime UK collector's description sums up how the bike is remembered locally: Raleigh was to British BMX roughly what Huffy was to the American mass market — not the choice of serious racers necessarily, but the bike that put BMX in front of more British kids than anything else on the market. That timing lines up with the arc the sport followed in Britain more broadly: a boom that arrived on a delay behind the U.S., and a collapse in the mid-to-late 1980s as mountain bikes took over — the Burner's run ending in 1988 sits right inside that decline.
The UK race team — through the mid-1980s
Raleigh backed a UK national race team through the mid-1980s. The 1985 line-up — Andy Ruffell, Craig Schofield, Martin Jose, and Stu Diggins — gave the Burner real credibility on the race circuit, not just at street level. That same year, the Raleigh team competed at the IBMXF World Championships in Canada, finishing fifth in the overall medal count, with Schofield winning the Superclass 20-inch title.
What we don't know
We haven't found a source that ties the Raleigh Burner's 1982 UK launch directly to the U.S. team's 1981 shutdown or 1982 restart — the timing lines up, but we're not asserting one caused the other. Reports differ on how directly Panasonic's mid-1980s Raleigh co-sponsorship touched the BMX side of the business versus the professional road-racing TI–Raleigh/Panasonic team; the clearest documented Panasonic tie is to Raleigh's road program, so we've kept it out of the BMX narrative above rather than assume a crossover we can't confirm.
Raleigh and Legend Bike Co.
Raleigh isn't a Legend Bike Co. brand, but its U.S. team put a Hall of Fame name — Jeff Bottema — in its catalog during BMX's first commercial wave, and its Burner range did for a generation of British kids roughly what Schwinn, Mongoose, and Huffy did for American ones: put a mass-market bike in front of nearly everyone before most of them ever saw a real race track.
Related pages
Jeff Bottema · Robinson Racing · NBA · BMX Action Magazine
Sources
Wikipedia, "Raleigh Bicycle Company" and "Raleigh Burner" — corporate history, Huffy licensing deal, and Burner model range and dates. BMXmuseum.com, "Raleigh Bicycle Company History" reference page — UK Burner trim-level detail, pricing, and the 1985 UK team line-up and World Championship result. SplendidBMX.com, "About Raleigh Bikes — BMX Profile and History" — UK market context and Grifter-to-Burner timeline. Legend Bike Co., Jeff Bottema chapter — primary detail on the Raleigh Cycle Company of America team, the July 1979 signing via Chuck Robinson, the 1980 European tour, and the January 1981 shutdown, sourced there to Wikipedia and BMXmuseum.com's Jeff Bottema reference pages. Additional web reporting on Toby Henderson's Raleigh tenure (1979–1981) and the Bottema/Henderson Europe demonstrations, cross-checked against the Bottema chapter for consistency.