Revcore — The Brand CW Racing Named After Its Own Hub (1988–1995)

Legend Bike Co · BMX heritage series

Most BMX brands are named after a person, a place, or an idea somebody had in a garage. Revcore was named after a hub. Not a metaphor about a hub — an actual part, sitting in an actual CW Racing catalog, that the company liked the sound of so much it painted the name on the side of the building.

That is the first thing to understand about Revcore, and it explains almost everything else. Revcore was not a new company. It was CW Racing, one of the recognizable Southern California race brands of the early 1980s, deciding in 1988 that it needed a fresh face and giving itself one out of its own parts bin.

Before Revcore: Coast Wheels, and what CW actually stood for

The chain starts with a bike shop. In 1979 Roger Worsham owned a shop called Coast Wheels in Yorba Linda, a small town next to Anaheim, and ran a race team out of it — Coast Wheels Racing, with Chris Blackburn, Chris Scott, Tony Swain and Henry Moreno among the original members.

In the early 1980s he started a BMX manufacturing company that became CW Racing, sold the Coast Wheels shop, and put his energy into the new business. And here is where forty years of confusion begins: CW stood for Custom Works, not Coast Wheels. Because Worsham owned both, everyone assumed the letters carried over. They never did. It is worth stating plainly, because the mistake is repeated constantly, and getting the name of a company wrong is exactly the kind of small error that hardens into accepted history.

CW put out a run of race frames through the decade — the Z frame in 1980, the XM-Mini in 1981, the ZX-Pro in 1982, the ZXL in 1983, the CZ-Phaze 1 in 1984, a full catalog of numbered Z-series bikes by 1985, and a California Freestyle model as the sport split in two. The race team over those years ran through names including Mike Miranda in 1981 and 1982, Pete Loncarevich from late 1983 to 1986, Dizz Hicks, Gary Pollack and Ceppie Maes, with Mike Buff on the freestyle side in 1986 and Pete Augustin arriving in 1987.

1988 — the rename

By 1988 the company wanted a reset, and it took one. CW changed its name and, in the words of the CW history that documents it, pretty much just became Revcore.

The choice of name is the good part. Revcore was already a CW product — the company's high-end hub. Bicross magazine, reviewing a Revcore bike in its June 1988 issue, spelled out the logic for French readers who had never heard the word: the name was not unknown to plugged-in Californians, because it was the name of a top-of-the-line CW hub. Rev for revolution, in the turning sense. Core for structure. When CW decided to put out a new brand, the staff liked how it sounded.

It is a small, practical, very BMX decision. A component name that had already earned some credibility got promoted to the front of the company, and the frames followed it.

The ownership chain

Revcore's short life is mostly a story about who held it. Worsham co-owned CW and Revcore with Bill Bellis, who was also the financial backer behind Hutch — which means that for a stretch of the late 1980s, one man had money in two of the more distinctive brands in the sport at once.

In 1989, around the same time Hutch was turned over to Bellis, Worsham decided he wanted out of the bicycle business altogether and sold his half of CW and Revcore to his partner. Bellis held it for about two years. In February 1991, per a BMX Plus! report from May 1992, he sold the company to Mike Ferriell and Jay Becht.

The company closed in 1995. And in a detail that says something about how BMX names outlive BMX companies, Bellis was still reported to hold the CW, Revcore and Hutch names as of 2002 — seven years after the doors shut.

What Revcore actually made

This is the thinnest part of the record, and we will not pad it. Two things are solid: Revcore built complete bikes and frames — a Revcore bike test ran in Bicross magazine number 69 in June 1988 — and it built hubs, since the hub is where the name came from in the first place.

Beyond that, the best surviving evidence is indirect but useful. The reproduction decal sets that restorers buy today are cut for two visually distinct generations of Revcore frame graphics, a Gen 1 white-with-yellow-triangle set and a Gen 2 triangle set offered on chrome and clear, plus a separate Gen 2 hub decal. That is a restoration supplier's catalog, not a factory document, but it does tell you the brand lived long enough to redesign its own graphics once and that its hubs were badged as a distinct product. Collector discussion also credits Revcore with pedals, stems, bars and seat posts and with heavy knurling as a house signature — that is a reasonable-sounding claim we could not verify from a period source, so it is flagged below rather than stated here.

Why it is worth a chapter

Revcore is a seven-year name on a fifteen-year company, and it is easy to write it off as a marketing exercise. But it is a clean example of something the sport did constantly in the late 1980s: brands that had built their reputation in the first BMX boom hit the late-decade downturn, and rather than fold, they changed clothes. Some of those resets worked. This one bought CW roughly seven more years.

It is also a reminder of how tangled the ownership was behind brands that looked like rivals on a start gate. CW and Hutch shared a backer. Riders moved between the two. A collector holding a Revcore frame and a Hutch frame is holding two bikes from the same checkbook.

Timeline

• 1979 Roger Worsham owns the Coast Wheels bike shop in Yorba Linda, California, and runs the Coast Wheels race team.
• Early 80s Worsham starts a BMX manufacturing company that becomes CW Racing — Custom Works — and sells the Coast Wheels shop.
• 1980 The CW Z frame, with its oval top tube, arrives, in long ZL Pro and medium ZM versions.
• 1981 The XM-Mini frame, built for small riders.
• 1982-1984 The ZX-Pro, the ZXL, then the CZ-Phaze 1.
• 1985 A full CW catalog: the Z 500, Z 1000, Z 2000 and Z 3000, plus the California Freestyle and a freestyle stem.
• 1986-1987 Mike Buff rides CW freestyle; Pete Augustin replaces Ceppie Maes on the team in 1987.
• 1988 CW renames itself Revcore, after its own top-of-the-line hub. A Revcore bike test runs in Bicross magazine no. 69, June 1988. Worsham co-owns the business with Bill Bellis, also the money behind Hutch.
• 1989 Worsham leaves the bicycle business and sells his half of CW and Revcore to Bellis, around the time Hutch is turned over to Bellis.
• 1991 February: Bellis sells the company to Mike Ferriell and Jay Becht.
• 1995 The company closes.
• 2002 Bellis is reported to still hold the CW, Revcore and Hutch names.

Sources

23mag.com, "CW and Revcore BMX Company" (23mag.com/com/revcore/revcore.htm) — the spine of this page: the Coast Wheels shop and race team in Yorba Linda, the Custom Works naming correction, the CW frame model years from the 1980 Z frame through the 1985 catalog, the 1988 rename to Revcore, the Worsham and Bellis co-ownership with Bellis also backing Hutch, the 1989 sale of Worsham's half, the February 1991 sale to Mike Ferriell and Jay Becht, the 1995 closure, and the 2002 note on who held the names. That page in turn credits homepage.ntlworld.com/cwracing (the CW history site), Bicross magazine and BMX Plus! Bicross magazine no. 69, June 1988 — the Revcore bike test, and the explanation of the name: Rev for revolution in the turning sense, Core for structure, taken from CW's top-of-the-line hub. BMX Plus!, May 1992 — the February 1991 sale to Ferriell and Becht, as cited by 23mag. Wikipedia, "Pete Loncarevich" — independent corroboration that Roger Worsham owned CW, that CW never stood for Coast Wheels, and that Loncarevich rode for CW from December 1983 to April 1986. bmxproducts.com — current reproduction decal catalog showing two generations of Revcore frame graphics and a Revcore hub decal; a restoration supplier, cited as evidence of what existed rather than as a factory document. bmxmuseum.com holds a Revcore reference section, a catalog scan and identification threads but blocks server-side access; bmxsociety.com has a Revcore hubs thread and was unreachable throughout this research. Neither is cited; both are flagged as open follow-ups.

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