SE Racing

The Story of Scot Enterprises — 1977 to Today

A BMXRacingHistory.com preview · hosted on Legend Bike Co

The man who founded SE Racing had already invented the sport. Scot Breithaupt — the godfather of BMX, the kid who ran the first organized races in Long Beach in 1970 — built SE in 1977 to put bikes under the riders he'd been racing against. I had a front-row seat to a chunk of it: I started sweeping floors at SE in 1981, twelve years old, and I'll fold in what I saw firsthand and tell you when I do.

Where it started

SE Racing didn't start with a frame. It started with a kid who had already gone and invented the whole sport.

By 1977, Scot Breithaupt was 20 years old, the reigning NBA #1 Pro from the year before, and the founder of BUMS — the Bicycle United Motocross Society — which had run the first organized BMX races in Long Beach back in November 1970. Track builder, sanction president, race promoter, all of it, all while he was still a teenager. Now he wanted the equipment side too. Not just put the races on. Build the bikes.

He registered the company as Scot Enterprises — "SE" — in 1977. Most histories drop the founding in Long Beach, where Scot grew up and where BUMS ran its first races, and that's close enough for a headline. The first actual SE production building was in Signal Hill, the little city tucked right next to Long Beach. SE moved later to the building everybody in the industry actually remembers — 6801 Paramount Boulevard, a few miles north in the city of Paramount. That's where the team and the production crew lived for most of SE's first run. Both addresses are right. They just belong to different chapters, and we'll flag which is which as we go.

The JU-6 — the first SE frame, 1978

The first thing to wear the SE head badge was an aluminum race frame, the JU-6, out in 1978. Most short tellings either skip this or get it backwards — the JU-6 was aluminum from day one. It was never a chromoly frame that got swapped over later. The name was a nod to Jeff Utterback, who'd closed out the 1977 NBA season ranked sixth in the country. "JU" for the initials, "6" for the number. And that set the whole SE playbook for the next ten years: put a rider's name on the frame, then let the rider go win on it.

Jeff Utterback leaves to start GJS Bicycles

Jeff didn't stick around long after the JU-6 dropped. He left to start GJS Bicycles with his brother and his dad. GJS ended up known across the industry for one thing in particular — a head tube gusset shape so distinctive that builders, us at Supercross BMX included, are still saying "GJS-style gusset" all these years later.

So now Jeff's gone, and SE has a frame with nobody's name on it.

The Rod Beckering crash

About the same time, that first JU-6 run showed its soft spot. At a national, SE team rider Rod Beckering snapped the head tube clean off mid-race and broke his jaw on the way down. No gusset on the head tube. Nothing holding that junction together.

The PK Ripper — 1978

Perry Kramer was next in line for a namesake frame. And Perry had watched Rod's crash up close. So before he'd let his name go anywhere near that aluminum frame, he told Scot to weld a gusset into the head tube junction first. Scot did it. That redesigned frame — the gusset, the flat-oval aluminum tubing — became Perry's bike: the PK Ripper.

It launched in 1978. People generally call it the first aluminum BMX frame that actually sold. It's been in continuous production for almost fifty years now — nothing else in BMX comes close. And the shape hasn't changed much: flat-oval tubes, gusseted head tube, those long clean welds the aluminum let you run.

Floval tubing

The tubing was its own story. SE called it Floval — flat-oval, say it fast. It was 6061 T-6 aluminum drawn so the tube had flat sides left and right and rounded faces top and bottom. The flats let you run welds long and straight and strong enough that you didn't need the separate gusset plates a steel frame would've wanted. The rounded top and bottom ate up compression load. And the whole tubeset came in around a third the weight of the same thing in chromoly.

Floval showed up on every signature SE frame after that.

The Quadangle and the GH Flyer

Next signature bike was the STR-1, built for Stu Thomsen. It had this four-bar triangular rear end, bent seat stays running parallel to the chainstays, and that shape is what gave it the name everybody uses now: the Quadangle. First one dropped in 1979. It's one of the most recognizable BMX frames ever built, and SE still puts out modern reissues of it today.

Around the same window SE built the GH Flyer, a smaller-spec frame for a young Greg Hill. Greg turned into a World Champion and one of the most dominant riders of the era. Putting a kid's name on a frame before he'd fully arrived was a bet, and it paid.

The GH Flyer didn't stay the GH Flyer, though. Same platform got renamed the DB-III, and eventually turned into the Mini Ripper — which is the name still hanging on SE's smaller-spec aluminum line today.

Who actually built the bikes — Race Inc, Green Duck, and the SE Basher

SE designed its frames. For the most part it didn't build them. The production ran through outside shops, and which shop built which frame is one of those pieces of the story the short versions just leave on the floor.

The PK Ripper was built by Race Inc, the contract shop that handled SE's aluminum race frames through the back half of the '70s and into the early '80s. Trouble was, the PK Ripper sold so fast Race Inc became the bottleneck. In 1979–1980, going into the holiday season, Race Inc couldn't get enough PK Rippers out the door in time. SE needed an answer, and fast.

The answer was a cheaper frame. SE put out the SE Basher — a mild-steel version of the PK Ripper, priced and spec'd below the aluminum bike. It gave SE something to move during the holiday window, pulled in a wider set of buyers, and took some of the heat off the aluminum frames Race Inc was already behind on.

The Basher was built by Green Duck, who at the time was also turning out the 26″ OM Flyer for SE. Side note for the deep-cut crowd: Green Duck was DG's manufacturing arm. DG — the other Southern California BMX brand from this era — ran Green Duck as its shop, and SE was a customer.

So for a stretch in 1979–1980, the SE catalog was coming out of three different shops at once: Race Inc on the aluminum PK Ripper, Green Duck on the mild-steel Basher and the OM Flyer, and SE's own in-house operation on the smaller component runs. That kind of split production was normal in BMX's first wave — the brand drew it up, the contract shop welded it together — and it's why collectors find all those little variations comparing same-year SE frames now.

The technology side — Reynolds, the OM Flyer, and Scot's one-off experiments

It's easy to file SE away as a team brand. The camo bus, the clinics, the factory guys winning plates. Easy to forget Scot was also chewing on the engineering side the whole time, trying to push the material forward. Aluminum race frames at all. Flat-oval tubing. Long welds and no gussets. None of that was standard before SE shipped it.

The Reynolds experiment is the one that sticks with me. Reynolds is the British steel tubing house — mountain and road builders have leaned on it for decades. Scot ran a version of the Quadangle in Reynolds tubing. Very few got made, and the ride was a different animal from the aluminum production bike.

The wildest Reynolds-era SE was Scot's own 26″ OM Flyer. His nickname around the BMX world was "OM" — "Old Man," the godfather title he carried. The OM Flyer was a 26-inch cruiser built around that name. Far as the record goes, exactly one Reynolds-tubed OM Flyer ever existed: the bike Scot rode himself.

Before the OM Flyer, Scot raced a bridge bike in public at least once — a Quadangle running a 24-inch rear and a 26-inch front. That mismatched wheel setup was the link between the standard 24-inch cruiser class and the full 26-inch big-bike thing the OM Flyer became. None of it was production. It was a one-off, raced by the founder, pointing at where the brand was about to head.

The Floval Flyer 24 — the cruiser, 1980-81

BMX had a cruiser class early on — 24-inch frames for older riders, or for races that wanted a steadier bike under you. SE's entry was the Floval Flyer 24, out around 1980-1981. Same flat-oval aluminum, scaled to a 24-inch wheel. It's one of the most copied cruiser geometries the sport's ever had.

Landing Gear, Landing Gear Lite, and the Standing Gear

One of the most recognizable things SE ever made wasn't a frame at all. It was a fork. The Landing Gear ran 1-1/4″ tubing on the legs, which was fat for a BMX fork back then. Everybody else ran narrower. Scot went the other way. It looked the part out front of those aluminum frames, it took a beating, and it built a reputation for it. Demand ran past the rest of the catalog — for a while in the early '80s you'd see Landing Gear bolted under non-SE frames just because riders wanted the fork.

SE scaled it down too, the Landing Gear Lite, 1″ legs, built for the smaller kids on the Mini Ripper. Same shape, same look, just sized down to the bike.

The Landing Gear had a signature finish at the bottom of each leg — the "bologna cut," an angled oval-faced cut on the leg bottom that turned into one of the visual fingerprints of an SE fork. Cutting that shape spit out little round off-cuts as scrap.

The Standing Gear

When freestyle blew up and riders started wanting foot platforms on the front of the bike, Mike Devitt at SE found a use for those scraps. He grabbed the bologna-cut bottoms that had been piling up on the shop floor, flipped them, and welded them to the top of the fork legs — one each side, two little 1-1/4″ round platforms sitting above the dropouts. He called it the Standing Gear.

Function-wise, it gave freestylers a spot to stand for fork tricks. The smart part was the rest of it — the piece you'd already paid to cut off was now the piece you were selling back. Devitt's Standing Gear is one of the cleaner little examples of how SE's race product kept turning into freestyle product as the sport split in the mid-'80s.

The freestyle side — the Quad Freestyle and Fred Blood's SE Trickster

SE's tie to freestyle actually runs earlier than any signature freestyle frame. According to BMX Freestylin' — Featuring the BMX Action Trick Team (Mike Buff, Bob Osborn, R.L. Osborn, and Len Weed; Wizard Publications, 1982), the half-pipe the BMX Action Trick Team used for its Anaheim Stadium debut — an ABA-coordinated motocross-intermission show — was borrowed from Scot Breithaupt of SE Racing, originally built for a Pepsi-Cola promotion. Long before the Quad Freestyle put the SE name on a ramp bike, Scot's equipment already had it on a ramp.

SE was a race brand first, but the freestyle boom of the early-to-mid '80s pulled just about every BMX brand into building trick bikes. SE's first swing was the Quad Freestyle — a freestyle take on the Quadangle, same four-bar rear end, spec'd for the new sport.

Fred Blood was the SE guy most tied to the freestyle program. After the Quad Freestyle came out, Fred wanted something that didn't look like everybody else's production frame. So SE built him the SE Trickster: a dual-top-tube frame with the top tube bent down and flattened so it — in my own words from my time in that building — "looked like an elephant stepped on it." The shape was cut to Fred's riding.

The Trickster was never a real production bike. A rare handful got built, mostly under Fred and a couple of other riders, and it's one of the more hunted pieces of SE freestyle history today. Different animal from the freestyle bikes SE later imported through Roland Bikes, down below — the Trickster was USA-built, low-volume, a true signature frame. Not an overseas mass-price build.

The Factory Team

By 1981 the SE factory team was a who's-who of the era. Perry Kramer. Stu Thomsen. Greg Hill. Jeff Utterback. Rod Beckering. Toby Henderson. Eric and Robbie Rupe. Darryl Young. Chris Sanchez. Bubba Hayes. Mike "Hollywood" Miranda rode for SE a short stretch before he moved on. Brian Lopes — later a four-time UCI Mountain Bike World Champion — came up through the SE program before he turned pro.

Honestly the list of riders who passed through SE is so long it's easier to ask who didn't. Pete "Pistol Pete" Loncarevich — a four-time ABA #1 Pro down the road and a co-founder of Legend Bike Co. — rode for SE for one single weekend, right when he first turned pro, before he went off to ride his family's own brand, LRP (Loncarevich Racing Products), and then on to CW. That's the kind of detail that gets cut from most career stories. It's also why SE keeps turning up in damn near every rider bio from that era.

The famous ride in 1981 was a school bus painted up in camouflage. The team took it across the country running BMX clinics at tracks and shops. The clinics paid the gas. The clinics packed the tracks with new kids. The new kids bought SE. Simple loop, and it worked.

Perry Kramer — the longest-running SE rider

Out of that whole list, Perry Kramer is in a category by himself. Perry is almost certainly the longest-tenured rider at one company in BMX history. He rode SE through the heart of the brand's first wave, put his name on the PK Ripper in 1978, and stayed into the back end of his racing days.

At the tail of his racing years Perry left SE to ride for Race Inc — yeah, the same Race Inc that used to build the PK Ripper. From there he stepped off the bike and into the business side, joining Giant Bicycles in 1988 as an outside sales rep. And then Perry came home. He's an SE sales rep to this day — well past forty years inside the same brand he helped build.

Putting your frame name on a 19-year-old in 1978 turned out to be a bet that kept paying across decades, owners, and whole eras of the sport.

Inside SE during the early 1980s

This is where I've got a small advantage. I started in the BMX industry at SE in 1981, 12 years old. I'd first met Scot Breithaupt about four years before that, around 8, at "the Pit" — the lot in Torrance where BMX Action's test riders rode and where most of the early Southern California scene ended up. Scot knew I was a latch-key kid and offered me a job at the Paramount building. Sweeping floors, stickering frames, packing boxes after school.

The Paramount crew I worked next to in those years was Scot himself, Mike Devitt, Perry Kramer, Byron Friday, Rod Beckering, Kendal Crabtree, and the rest of the production guys. Jeff Utterback, Fred Blood, and Toby Henderson all came through regular. I'm putting my recollection in where it adds context the published histories don't carry. Everywhere else, we cited the source.

The mainstream push — Murray, the SE Mauler, and the Roland Bikes years

Here's another Scot project that gets left out: the long, deliberate push to drag BMX down in price — get it out of the bike shop and onto the floor of the mass-market stores where most American kids actually bought their first bike.

First swing was a deal with Murray, the Tennessee outfit that fed department stores and discount chains for decades. The plan was a bike called the SE Mauler by SE — SE-designed, Murray-built, sold through Murray's channels at a price well under the aluminum race frames. Scot's thinking was dead simple: if BMX was going to be the youth sport of the '80s, there had to be an entry bike at a price a normal family could swing. The Mauler deal never hit the scale he wanted.

The next try landed. Scot teamed up with Roland Bikes out of Texas to bring in a full line of cheaper, mainstream-priced SE-branded bikes — built overseas in Taiwan, imported through Roland. A few carried SE team riders' names:

• SE Bronco — named after team rider Rod Beckering, whose nickname was "Bronco."
• SE Hauler — named after Toby Henderson, whose nickname was "Hauler."
• SE Trickmaster — the freestyle bike in the Roland-built line.

The Roland deal covered scooters too. SE brought in a line called Rad Scoots — sold as the SE Scooter — through that same Taiwan-import pipe. First time SE ever put its name on something that wasn't a bicycle. (For the record: the SE Trickster from earlier was a separate, low-volume, USA-built Fred Blood signature frame. Not part of the Roland line.)

The Roland line did what the Murray deal was supposed to do. It put SE at price points the aluminum race frames could never touch, and it kept the brand in front of kids who'd later move up to a PK Ripper or a Quadangle once they got serious about racing.

The bankruptcy

SE was out front of the first BMX boom. Which meant it was out front of the first BMX bust too.

The crash of 1986-1988 took apart every BMX brand that had scaled up in the early '80s. SE went under in that stretch. I was in the SE building the day Rich Long and Gary Turner of GT Bicycles walked in and bought the equipment out of 6801 Paramount Boulevard — the same tooling that would become the founding capital of GT's frame production. Think about that for a second. The company that defined the first wave of the sport handed its tools, literally, to the company that defined the second. One of the cleanest pivots in BMX history, and I watched it happen.

My last day at SE was the day before I started at GT. Debit, the SE office manager, handed me my check and said, "Hey, you started GT on Monday. I brokered you out a job, and away you go." That story's mine. The bigger equipment transfer to GT is in the histories of both companies.

The Long Beach restart attempt — mid-1980s

SE didn't stay dead. Mid-'80s, the brand tried to restart out of a storage warehouse in Long Beach under different leadership. It never built into a long-running product line, but it did kick out one frame worth remembering.

By then I was running my TECH Racing Team, and I went to Mike Devitt at SE to get bikes for my riders. Devitt built a stretched PK Ripper for Brian Lopes that worked great, and a stretched Quadangle for Billy Harrison that flexed more than we wanted. So I sat down with Devitt and we drew up a straight-tube race frame using Quadangle dropouts and rear stays — called it the Assassin. One of SE's first straight-tube race frames. The Assassin prototype went under Billy Harrison, SE couldn't build the rest of the run, and not being able to supply my own TECH team is exactly what pushed me to start Supercross BMX in 1989.

The Advanced Sports era — August 2002

SE Racing got bought in August 2002 by Advanced Sports International, the Philadelphia parent company behind Fuji, Kestrel, Breezer, and a few other bike brands. ASI renamed it SE Bikes and relaunched on a heritage-first plan — reissues of the PK Ripper, the Quadangle, and the Floval Flyer in classic chromoly and aluminum, original-spec geometry, updated parts.

And then something nobody drew up happened. Through the 2000s and 2010s under ASI, SE Bikes found a whole second audience. The 26-inch and 29-inch big-wheel BMX frames — the Big Ripper and the Fat Ripper — became the bike of the "Bike Life" wheelie movement coming out of urban scenes in New York, Philly, and other East Coast cities. SE didn't engineer that. It happened on its own, and then SE chased it with more models, more colorways, more big-wheel sizes. The Big Ripper became, for a stretch, the highest-volume frame the brand ever sold.

Todd Lyons — the face of modern SE

None of that modern run happens without Todd Lyons. Todd joined SE in 2004 as a rider, two years after Advanced Sports bought the brand. By 2006 he'd moved into the marketing director seat, and he's been the public face of SE for more than twenty years — through the Advanced Sports years, the 2018 ASE Chapter 11, the bankruptcy auction, the BikeCo handoff, all the ownership changes that came with it. Every Big Ripper, every Vans collab, every Retro Series reissue from the 2000s on has gone out the door under Todd's direction.

Here's the way I see it. Scot's whole mission at SE was to get butts on bikes — put BMX in front of as many young riders as he could. Todd is the guy who finished that job in the modern era. His #bikelife crew carried the brand into a generation of riders the original factory team never touched. Same company that sold a few thousand PK Rippers a year out of Paramount in the early '80s is now selling Big Rippers to kids who never raced a national in their life. Different audience. Same mission. Different generation running it.

The Vans collaboration

In 2018 SE Bikes did its first formal collab with Vans — the shoe-and-apparel brand that'd been part of the BMX freestyle world since the early '80s. The Vans × SE Bikes line ran co-branded Big Rippers, Fat Rippers, and PK Rippers in Vans's checkerboard and side-stripe colorways. It's kept going through multiple drops into 2024 and stands as one of the most visible heritage crossovers in BMX.

Scot Breithaupt's death — July 2015

Scot Breithaupt was found dead in Indio, California on July 6, 2015. He was 57. The founder of BMX racing as an organized sport, the founder of SE Racing, a USA BMX Hall of Famer. By then he was no longer tied to SE Bikes — ASI had owned it thirteen years — but every PK Ripper and every Quadangle off a line since 2002 still wears his head badge and the company name he registered as a 20-year-old in 1977.

The bankruptcy of Advanced Sports — 2019

Advanced Sports Enterprises — the U.S. operating company that held SE Bikes alongside Fuji, Kestrel, Breezer, and Tuesday — filed Chapter 11 in November 2018. In February 2019 the wholesale bicycle operations were bought through bankruptcy court for $16.1 million by a partnership of Tiger Capital Group and Advanced Holdings, operating as a new entity called BikeCo, LLC. SE Bikes and its trademarks moved to BikeCo as part of that, right alongside Fuji, Kestrel, Breezer, and Tuesday.

In October 2019, Tiger Capital sold its stake in BikeCo to its joint-venture partner. Since then BikeCo has been wholly owned by Hong Kong-based Advanced Holdings Co. Ltd., headed by George Hsu. BikeCo is the exclusive distributor of SE Bikes, Fuji, Kestrel, Breezer, and Tuesday across the Americas, Africa, and Southern Asia. SE's current branding reads "SE BIKES Powered By BikeCo."

Where SE stands today

The PK Ripper has been in continuous production since 1978. That's the single longest run of any frame in BMX, and the only one closing in on fifty years. The Quadangle, the Floval Flyer, the GH Flyer, the Big Ripper — all of them are in current production in some shape, sitting alongside newer models built on the same heritage geometry.

SE Racing started as one guy, one frame, one team. Forty-nine years later it's owned by a Hong Kong holding company, sold across three continents, and ridden by two crowds at once — the heritage collectors who bought the original PK Rippers in 1978, and the wheelie kids who weren't even a market until 2010. Both groups are riding the same shape Scot Breithaupt and Perry Kramer argued out in a little office in Paramount, California, before most of them were born.

Sources

Wikipedia: SE Racing, Scot Breithaupt, Perry Kramer, Advanced Sports International.

SE Bikes official brand history (sebikes.com/pages/history).

BMXmuseum.com bike databases and forums — SE Racing section.

oldschoolmags.com — archived PDF scans of the original BMX Action, BMX Plus, Super BMX, Freestylin', and GO magazine bike tests, including the SE Floval Flyer (1982), OM Flyer (1981), PK Ripper (1981 and 1985), Quadangle (1980, 1981, 1983, 1984), Quadangle Freestyle (1985), Hauler (1985), and Trickmaster (1986).

bmxultra.com — "Scot Breithaupt: The History of SE Racing" interview.

Bicycle Retailer and Industry News — "BMX founding father Scot Breithaupt found dead at 57" (July 2015); "Tiger Group sells BikeCo stake to Advanced Holdings" (October 2019).

USA BMX Hall of Fame inductee records.

Mike Buff, Bob Osborn, R.L. Osborn, and Len Weed, BMX Freestylin' — Featuring the BMX Action Trick Team (Wizard Publications, 1982), for the Anaheim Stadium half-pipe/Pepsi-Cola promotion detail.

Primary-source recollection: Bill Ryan, founder of Supercross BMX and co-owner of Legend Bike Co., on his time as an SE employee at 6801 Paramount Boulevard from 1981 through the mid-1980s. Bill first met Scot Breithaupt around age 8 at "the Pit" in Torrance and was hired by Scot at age 12. Bill's direct recollections fill several gaps the published sources do not cover, including: SE's first production building being in Signal Hill before the move to Paramount Boulevard; the original JU-6 being aluminum (not chromoly); Jeff Utterback's departure to start GJS Bicycles with his brother and father; the Rod Beckering head tube failure and broken jaw; the production crew at the Paramount building (Scot, Mike Devitt, Perry Kramer, Byron Friday, Rod Beckering, Kendal Crabtree); the GH Flyer / DB-III / Mini Ripper naming progression; Race Inc as the PK Ripper's contract builder and the 1979–1980 holiday capacity shortfall; the SE Basher mild-steel frame; Green Duck as the contract builder for the Basher and the OM Flyer, and Green Duck being DG's manufacturing arm; the Reynolds-tubed Quadangle and the one-off 26″ OM Flyer; the transitional 24″/26″ Quadangle; the failed Murray partnership behind the SE Mauler and the subsequent Roland Bikes (Taiwan-import) partnership; the Quad Freestyle and the separate USA-built SE Trickster as Fred Blood's signature; the SE Landing Gear fork and Mike Devitt's Standing Gear; Pete Loncarevich's single-weekend SE ride; Perry Kramer's full career arc (SE → Race Inc → Giant 1988 → back to SE); the equipment transfer to GT; and the Assassin frame design.