RRS Racing — Riverside Redlands Schwinn: The Bike Shop Brand Behind the UNCruiser

RRS Racing — Riverside Redlands Schwinn: The Bike Shop Brand Behind the UNCruiser

A BMXRacingHistory.com preview · hosted on Legend Bike Co

RRS never set out to be a frame company. It was a pair of Schwinn shops in Riverside County, run by a father and his two sons, that got pulled into BMX the same way half the shops in this series did — a kid on a bike, a race team that needed equipment, and a shop owner who figured he'd just build it himself. What came out of that was a shop-team bike with a bottom bracket nobody else was running and a 24-inch cruiser that changed what "cruiser" meant in BMX racing for good.

Griswold's, Randolph's, and two Schwinn shops

Joe and Imogene Kundig bought a Redlands, California sporting-goods store from its retiring owner and turned it into a dedicated Schwinn dealership — the shop that would become Redlands Schwinn Cyclery. Joe and Imogene had two sons, Craig and Jim, and it's Craig who built what came next. A second store followed in Riverside, and the combined operation took the name Riverside Redlands Schwinn — RRS for short.

A childhood friend of Craig's who worked the counter with him left a first-person account of the shop's early days on bmxmuseum.com: the two of them unloading boxcars of Schwinn Varsitys and Stingrays into old orange-packing warehouses, Craig fresh out of "Schwinn school" and teaching his friend to true wheels and set up brakes, and the Riverside store effectively left to the two teenagers to run while the local Schwinn BMX scene took off around them. A race team followed almost immediately once word got out that a couple of teenagers were running the shop.

The shop team

The original RRS roster, by that same firsthand account, ran Kirk Claveau, his brother Joe Claveau, Keith Peel, Kevin McNeal, and Mike Miranda — with the team logo designed by a friend of Miranda's. RRS's first stab at a product of its own, a hidden-bolt stem, didn't hold up; the design lacked the offset to stay tight and the shop's owners called it "junk" in hindsight. It was, in their own words, an early habit of solving problems nobody had asked them to solve.

Craig Kundig's real strength turned out to be coaching. He took on a nine-year-old named Geoff Rutherford and helped him win the ABA's No. 1 plate for California in 1978 — RRS's first real result at the national level. Around the same time, the shop was building and tuning race bikes for some of the fastest riders in the Riverside area, including Stu Thomsen, Greg Hill, Kevin McNeal, and Lee Medlin — work that put RRS's name on national-caliber bikes well before the shop had a frame of its own to sell.

The chassis

Rutherford's success gave RRS a reason to build its own frame instead of relying on custom builds from outside shops. Craig Kundig and his friend had strong opinions about how a BMX race frame should be put together, and they leaned into them rather than chasing what was already selling. The result was a 4130 chromoly diamond frame carrying features nobody else was running in the late 1970s: a ten-speed-sized headset borrowed straight off a road bike, vertical dropouts, cantilever brake mounts at a time when the rest of the industry was still welding on caliper bridges, and an eccentric bottom bracket that let a rider tension the chain by rotating the bracket shell rather than loosening the rear wheel or resetting the brakes.

The very first RRS prototype, built for Rutherford, came out of Gary Turner's shop — the same Gary Turner who co-founded GT with Richard Long, and whose workmanship RRS turned to because the Kundig shops were already selling a lot of GT frames. As demand grew, RRS shifted production work to a fabricator named Mike Toth in Yucaipa, who helped refine the geometry and built out the RRS line through the turn of the decade.

RRS's Hall of Fame nomination material later credited Craig Kundig specifically with being first to add cantilever mounts to a BMX frame — a feature that eventually became standard across the industry — along with head-tube angles and bottom-bracket heights the same materials describe as ahead of most of the field at the time.

The UNCruiser and the 24-inch standard

RRS's biggest mark on the sport came from the cruiser class. Through 1980, cruiser racing meant 26-inch wheels — full-sized beach-cruiser frames adapted for BMX. Craig Kundig broke from that in 1981, putting one of his fastest amateur team riders, Joe Claveau, on a 24-inch RRS frame instead. Claveau didn't just hold his own on the smaller wheel — he won the ABA National No. 1 Cruiser rider title that year, and the rest of the cruiser class followed him onto 24-inch wheels. The size has been the standard for BMX cruiser racing ever since, and Craig Kundig's own ABA Hall of Fame materials put it plainly: every cruiser racer since owes that wheel size, in part, to what happened on Claveau's RRS that year.

Lee Medlin's one weekend

Lee Medlin, the Corona-raised amateur who'd go on to a run of NBA and NBL Grandnational titles, rode for RRS for exactly one weekend — August 21 and 22, 1982, at the NBL's Ascot National in Gardena, California. He'd just left Kuwahara and signed with Raleigh the very next day, making the RRS deal little more than a bridge between two longer sponsorships. It's a small footnote in Medlin's career, but it's also one of the most precisely dated facts in this whole story — down to the exact weekend, sourced to period BMX Plus! and BMX Action coverage.

The Delta Racing riders, and the bar CW beat them to

Around 1979, RRS picked up a run of former Delta Racing Products team riders — brothers Dirk and Denny Davidow, along with Jimmy Bertoldo. Denny Davidow's unusually steep steering-angle preferences, carried over from his DRP days, shaped some of the geometry RRS built for him.

That same year, RRS came up with a handlebar design meant to follow the Redline V-bar as the next big seller — a straight, 7/8-inch bar with the grip and crossbar formed as one continuous piece. Before RRS got the bar to market, one of its own amateurs, a young rider named Andy Zirzow, left the team to ride for CW. A nearly identical bar showed up under the CW name within two weeks, went on to become one of the best-selling BMX bars ever made, and CW — itself a bike shop turned brand, the same way RRS was — beat RRS to a design RRS says it originated. In a separate episode from the same period, RRS handed a freestyle seatpost prototype to a manufacturer's rep for a production quote; the exact prototype showed up, unchanged, in that company's mail-order catalog one week later. After that, RRS made a point of keeping its production in Southern California.

Corona, Kuwahara, and what came after

Craig Kundig's ABA Hall of Fame nomination materials also credit him with running the BMX program at Corona Raceway around 1981, and say he was forced to shut it down when the property sold to homebuilders — the same track this series covers in its own Corona Raceway chapter, which attributes the track's operation to Steve and Nancy Rink's Peddlepower shop. We haven't found a source that reconciles the two accounts, so we're presenting both rather than picking one.

There's no documented date for when RRS stopped building race frames. The last confirmed on-track RRS sponsorship in the record is Lee Medlin's single weekend in August 1982. What's clear is that the shops behind the brand never closed. They grew into Cyclery USA, still running today under Craig Kundig in Redlands, Riverside, and Rancho Cucamonga — a straight line from a Schwinn franchise bought by his parents to a multi-store operation that's won three ABA No. 1 Bike Shop Team titles in a row and been named one of America's best bike shops for six years running.

What we don't know

  • The name and year of the original Redlands shop. Legend Bike Co.'s own "Bike Shops That Made BMX" chapter, matching a first-person bmxmuseum.com account from a childhood friend of Craig Kundig, says Joe Kundig bought Redlands' Griswold's Sporting Goods in 1969. But a first-person letter from Craig Kundig himself, posted on Cyclery USA's own website for the company's 2018 50th anniversary, says his parents bought Randolph's Bike and Sporting Goods in Redlands — dating the purchase to November 1968. We're presenting both because they come from two different first-person sources that don't agree, and we won't guess which one is right.
  • When the Riverside store opened. Craig Kundig's own 50th-anniversary letter puts the Riverside purchase at "40 years" before 2018 — around 1978 — which is later than the impression left by the bmxmuseum.com memoir of two kids running the store through their early teens. We can't reconcile the timeline precisely.
  • Who actually designed the eccentric bottom bracket. Two separate reader comments on cruiserrevolution.com credit a Riverside machinist, Richard "Dick" Reens, as the bracket's original designer, distinct from Craig Kundig or RRS itself. This isn't corroborated in any other source we found.
  • Craig Kundig and Kuwahara. It's repeated in secondary online sources that Kundig went on to manage Kuwahara's factory BMX team after RRS. We could not locate a dated, citable primary source for this and are flagging it as unverified.
  • Oldschoolmags.com's RRS coverage. Search indexing shows oldschoolmags.com hosting a BMX Plus! cruiser test and a 20-inch RRS test from 1981-82, plus period ads. We could not load the site's pages directly to confirm what those tests say, so we're citing their existence, not their content.
  • Exact end date of RRS as a race-frame brand. Not documented anywhere we found. The last confirmed sponsorship activity is Lee Medlin's weekend in August 1982.

Related Legend Bike Co. chapters

Sources

bmxmuseum.com — "RRS Racing Chronicles" (bmxmuseum.com/bikes/info/198), a first-person history posted by a childhood friend and shop partner of Craig Kundig, plus individual RRS bike listings (e.g. bmxmuseum.com/bikes/rrs/29072) documenting frame specs and cantilever-brake hardware. bmxsociety.com — community forum threads on RRS and the UNCruiser, including "1981 RRS Racing 24” UNCruiser (The bike that changed cruiser racing)" and "All Things R&R," referenced at the title/snippet level; the forum's JavaScript-rendered pages could not be loaded in full to verify thread content beyond what search indexing surfaced. cruiserrevolution.com — "Craig Kundig: part of 24” BMX history" (2011) and "The RRS frame that revolutionized racing" (2016), including a reproduced excerpt from Craig Kundig's 2004 ABA Hall of Fame nomination and reader comments crediting Richard "Dick" Reens for the bottom-bracket design. cycleryusa.com — "Kundig inducted into ABA Hall of Fame" (reproducing the ABA's 2004 nomination text in full) and Craig Kundig's own 2018 50th-anniversary letter describing the shops' founding. en.wikipedia.org — the Lee Medlin rider page, sourced to contemporaneous BMX Plus! and BMX Action magazine issues, for the exact August 1982 RRS sponsorship dates. oldschoolmags.com — search-indexed listings confirming RRS ads and a BMX Plus! cruiser/20-inch test from 1981-82; page content could not be loaded directly to verify specifics. Legend Bike Co. — "The Bike Shops That Made BMX" and "Corona Raceway" chapters, cross-referenced for consistency.