A BMXRacingHistory.com chapter · hosted on Legend Bike Co.

S&S Performance

The Street & Strip brand that sponsored Pistol Pete between Cook Bros. and TW — also remembered as "S&S Bicycles"

By Bill Ryan · Founder of Supercross BMX · 37+ years in BMX · Started at SE Racing, 1981

Here is a brand that put its name on one of the best racers BMX ever produced, and almost nobody can tell you who ran it. A 12-year-old kid named Pete Loncarevich rode for S&S Performance in 1978. That same kid grew up to win damn near everything there was to win. And the company that backed him for that one year? The paper trail on it is thin enough to read through. That gap is the whole reason this page exists.

I am telling it the way I have told the rest of these chapters — straight, and only as far as the sources go. Where the record runs out, I will say so.

The name, first

S&S stands for Street & Strip. In the BMX press of the day the full name was S&S (Street & Strip) Performance Products. That phrasing came straight out of the hot-rod and drag world — late-1970s parts catalogs used Street & Strip for gear that would run fine on the road and still hold up at the strip on the weekend. The BMX guys borrowed it like a lot of early BMX borrowed from the car crowd.

The Pete Loncarevich anchor

The one solid thread you can pull on S&S runs through a single rider — Pete Loncarevich.

His Wikipedia entry walks the whole sponsor chain with magazine citations, and it lays the amateur teams out in order:

• 1977 — Cook Bros.
• 1978 — S&S (Street & Strip) Performance Products
• December 1979 to September 1980 — TW Racing
• September 1980 to December 1982 — Diamondback (Loncarevich would turn pro on Diamondback in December 1982)

That S&S line is footnoted to BMX Plus! July 1993 Vol.16 No.7 pg.64 — the "Pistol Pete Speaks" career interview, which is about as close to a long-form primary source on his full sponsor run as you will find. Pete was 12 in 1978, racing 12 Expert through Southern California's National Bicycle Association district. And he was already winning. He took his first national — the 1978 NBA Corona National, 12 Expert — before the S&S year was even out.

So that is what S&S really is in the story. The bridge. The year between Cook Bros. and TW. Pull it out and the Pistol Pete timeline has a hole in it. Leave it in and the whole thing reads clean.

What S&S Performance made

Frames and parts. The stuff that actually survived is the cruiser line. BMXmuseum.com catalogues S&S Performance Products bikes, the S&S Newport — a 26" full-size cruiser racer — and the S&S Bigfoot 26, with examples dated 1979 and 1980 in chromoly. A separate BMXmuseum.com forum thread title ("S&S Newport and Rainbow cruisers") suggests a third cruiser model, an S&S Rainbow, may also exist under the same name — we could not load the thread's actual content to confirm the details, so we are flagging the model name as an unconfirmed lead rather than stating it as fact. They ran 20" and 26" frame ads in the back pages of BMX Action through the late 1970s and into the early 1980s. Today it is the 26" cruisers that turn up in collector hands. The 20" race frames, going by what the old-school crowd says, were the harder ones to come by even then.

Forum threads on BMXmuseum.com put the company around Newport Beach in the early days, with a move to Anaheim later on. When S&S walked away from bicycles in the mid-1980s, the Newport cruiser tooling didn't just go in a dumpster — it carried over to a separate brand called TBS, which renamed the model the Islander. S&S itself went a different direction entirely, off into aftermarket Harley-Davidson parts.

Founding year, the year it closed, the names of the people who ran it, whatever connection there was between S&S and that later TBS outfit — none of that is locked to a source I would put my name behind. Anyway, if you have got original paperwork, a dated mention in the trade press, or an ad with a real contact address on it, send it over.

Where S&S sits in the era

The late-1970s Southern California scene was crawling with little shops exactly like this one. Up top you had the brands running real national factory programs — Redline, Mongoose, SE Racing, Torker, Webco, JMC, GT, Diamond Back, Skyway, Schwinn, Hutch, CW Racing, Haro. Underneath them sat a long line of regional shops cutting their own frames, running quarter-page ads, picking up a local hotshot for a season or two. Some of them grew into the next tier. Most just faded out when the boom went soft between 1986 and 1988.

But S&S Performance put a 12-year-old kid on a bike in 1978 — a kid who went on to four ABA national No.1 Pro titles, two NBL National No.1 Pro titles, a 1990 IBMXF Pro World Championship, and a 1997 induction into the ABA BMX Hall of Fame. You can have the thinnest written record in the sport and a single line like that still earns you a spot on the map.

What we are asking the community to fill in

• The exact founding year of S&S (Street & Strip) Performance Products
• The founders' names and the company address
• The year S&S Performance exited the bicycle market
• The full S&S Performance team roster from 1978 to 1982 beyond Pete Loncarevich
• The relationship between S&S Performance Products and TBS (the brand that continued the Newport cruiser as the Islander)
• Whether the "S&S Rainbow" cruiser referenced in a BMXmuseum.com forum thread title is a real, separate model
• Original BMX Action, BMX Plus!, or Super BMX ads — issue, page, scan or photo

Sources

Wikipedia — Pete Loncarevich; amateur sponsor table listing S&S (Street & Strip) Performance Products as Loncarevich's 1978 sponsor, footnoted to BMX Plus! July 1993 Vol.16 No.7 pg.64 ("Pistol Pete Speaks") and to Bicycle Motocross Action January 1981 Vol.6 No.1 pg.74. BMXmuseum.com — S&S Performance Products brand pages, including the 1979 S&S Bigfoot 26 (entry 55274), the 1982 S&S Works Replica (entry 64652), the forum thread "Some semi-reliable info on the S&S / TBS Connection" (id 490486), the forum thread "S&S Newport and Rainbow cruisers" (id 782159, title checked only, content not loaded), and the forum thread "S&S Works" (id 337510). oldschoolmags.com — archived PDF scans of BMX Action, BMX Plus!, and Super BMX, late 1970s through mid-1980s. Both oldschoolmags.com and BMXmuseum.com's broader brand index were checked directly in July 2026 to confirm S&S Performance and "S&S Bicycles" are the same company; no evidence of a second, distinct company was found.

Last reviewed: July 2026. This chapter will be updated as additional source material becomes available.