When Tommy Brackens got the hole, the race was already over. That was the thing about him. In a straight line off the gate, nobody caught Tommy. He raced BMX for about eight years, 1980 through 1988, and in that window he did just about everything a pro could do except win a national number-one plate. He was the 1986 IBMXF Pro World Champion. He won the 1987 NORA Cup, BMX Action's reader-voted top-pro honor. He rode for four of the brands that defined the decade — Powerlite, Torker, GT, and his own Brackens Racing — and the ABA put him in the Hall of Fame in 1991, three years after he walked away.

But the wins aren't really the story. The kind of racer he was is the story. He got holeshots better than almost anyone alive. Holeshot is the word BMX uses for getting out front the instant the gate drops, and Tommy owned that moment. NBL announcer Bob Hunt started calling him "The Human Dragster" at the 1982 NBL Grand Nationals, and the name stuck because it was true. When Tommy got the hole, everybody else was racing for second.

Motocross, Team Jag, and the switch to BMX

He was born in Los Angeles on November 20, 1960. Before he ever threw a leg over a BMX bike, he raced motorcycle motocross. He came across to BMX in 1977, and after his BMX days wound down he went right back to MX — but that middle decade on a 20-inch bike is what put him in the books.

Here's how it started. In the late 1970s, race promoter Renny Roker — the same Renny Roker who ran the JAG World Championships, related to news anchor Al Roker and actress Roxie Roker — put together Team Jag, the first all-Black BMX team. The riders came mostly out of South Central Los Angeles. Three of them ended up in the Hall of Fame: Tommy Brackens, Anthony Sewell, and Turnell "Tuni" Henry. Team Jag was a big deal. They starred in the BMX episode of CHiPs and made the cover of Ebony Jr. magazine. Sewell won an IBMXF World Championship in 1978. Tommy would do the same in 1986. Tuni Henry kept racing for decades and went on to run his own track and his own team.

Team Jag matters beyond the results, though. It was one of the first real, organized pushes to get Black riders into the sport at the top level, and every key member made his own mark. For Tommy, it's where the whole thing properly began.

Amateur years and the 1980 Race of Champions

His amateur career topped out at the 1980 Grand Nationals, where he won the Race of Champions. The prize was a $3,000 Fisher stereo system. That was real money in 1980, and because it wasn't cash it didn't cost him his amateur status the way an equal cash prize would have. The ROC win stamped him as one of the best amateurs in the country heading into the new decade.

Then in 1981, with the ABA's new "A" Pro class just getting started, Tommy became the first pro to take a second-place finish in that class. The NBA named him Most Improved Rider the same year. Two honors, two sanctioning bodies, one season. He'd arrived.

Powerlite, then Torker, then GT

His early factory years were with Powerlite, an independent Southern California brand that backed him through the early 1980s. On October 1, 1983, he signed with Torker BMX Products — one of the biggest names of the era. Torker's pitch at the time was "One Step Ahead" and "We Ship Performance," and Tommy became one of the faces of it.

The Torker run ended the way a lot of BMX deals ended in 1984. The company went bankrupt. And not quietly — it folded while the race team was out on an East Coast tour. Tommy didn't even know until people started walking up to him at races to tell him the news. On the flight home, GT Bicycles owner Richard Long offered him a spot on the GT factory team. Tommy took it. He rode for GT from November 1984 through December 31, 1986.

Those GT years were his best as a racer, and that's saying something, because the GT team back then was loaded. Eddie Fiola ran freestyle. Harry Leary was there. The racing side was deep. Tommy slotted in and delivered. But his contract ran out at the end of 1986, and GT came back with a renewal on reduced terms — they wanted to keep him, just at a lower salary, with bigger contingency awards (the bonuses you earn for winning individual races) to make up the difference.

He turned it down. According to the September 1999 issue of Snap magazine, the lower offer didn't sit right because Tommy felt Eddie Fiola and fellow racer Gary Ellis were being paid more than he was being offered. After two years of producing for GT, including the best season of his life in 1986, the math didn't work for him. So he walked.

1986: the best season

1986 was the kind of year that defines a career. He won the IBMXF Pro World Championship, the international federation title that stood right alongside the JAG Worlds as one of the most prestigious events in the sport. He won the European Championship that same year. And he finished the NBL season as National #2 — he crashed in his semi while only a few points back of eventual champion Pete Loncarevich, who, by the reports, wasn't even racing well that year and barely qualified for the main.

That National #1 plate was the one thing that kept slipping away from him his whole career. He was never the ABA #1 or the NBL #1 as a pro. His own read on it, which got reported plenty, was that little variables — track conditions, an unexpected delay — could get into his head. He said he lacked the "killer instinct" that the dominant guys like Stu Thomsen and Pete Loncarevich had. He was a power racer, weaker in the turns, which meant a strong technical rider who caught up to him could get by.

None of that changes the fact that he was an IBMXF World Champion in 1986. That puts him in a very small group of American racers who ever held a world title.

1987: the NORA Cup and the "King of the Mountain"

1987 brought him two honors that fit him perfectly. The first was the BMX Action NORA Cup — the reader-voted Number One Racer Award — which he won with 17.91% of the vote. He'd always said his goal was to be the people's favorite:

The NORA Cup was about the clearest proof of that goal you could ask for. The readers of the biggest BMX magazine in the country voted, and they voted Tommy. Mike Miranda had won it the year before, in 1986. Greg Hill had it the three years before that. 1987 was Tommy's. And it told you everything about how his quiet, shy, easy-to-like personality played with the fans — not just the people on the podium, but the kids hanging on the fence.

The 91 mph run down Tramway Road

The second thing from that era was stranger, and by Tommy's own account it meant more to him personally. In 1986 he'd gotten into GPV racing — Gravity Powered Vehicle, an outlaw sport where you take a bike, pull the pedals off, and race it downhill. GPV had been kicking around since the late 1970s, but it caught on with BMX racers starting in 1985. The big event was the "King of the Mountain" down Tramway Road in Palm Springs. Steep, fast, technical.

Tommy won the 1986 King of the Mountain on a converted 20-inch bike. They clocked him at 91 miles per hour on the way down.

Think about that. For a guy whose entire BMX career came down to how fast he could get off a start gate, getting clocked at 91 mph on a modified kid's bike down a mountain road was a whole different kind of rush. In his own words:

He kept GPV racing into the early 2000s, long after his BMX career was done, and got invited to the ESPN X Video Games GPV events in Saint George, Utah in the mid-2000s. Turned out the Human Dragster name worked on more than one kind of vehicle.

Brackens Racing: 1988–1990

In July 1988, Tommy started his own BMX company, Brackens Racing Products. The signature frame had a distinctive triangle gusset behind the bottom bracket on the chainstays. You could pick a Brackens frame out of a magazine photo or off a starting gate from across the track.

The first rider Brackens Racing factory-sponsored was Kevin "Sheepdog" Hull, who had left GT around the same time Tommy did. Hull was the original Brackens rider, there from the start. Later, Brackens Racing picked up a young Eric Carter at the front end of his pro career — Carter went on to become one of the defining riders of the next generation across BMX racing, mountain biking, and dual slalom. Spotting Carter early was a genuinely good call. But Hull came first.

Brackens Racing ran from July 1988 through 1990 under Tommy's own ownership. The brand name was later sold to Power Source / Roost in late 1994, and they kept building frames under the Brackens name for a stretch after that.

Injuries and the end of the racing career

His injury record was about average for a career pro. He sprained a wrist at the Pompano Beach national in May 1983 and was laid up about a month. In August 1987, at the NBL Lemoore, California nationals, his handlebars stabbed him in a leg muscle in a practice crash before the Friday pre-race, and he had to sit out both the Saturday and Sunday nationals.

The racing career effectively wound down after 1988, at age 28. He went back to motorcycle motocross — his first discipline, from before BMX — then moved into GPV racing and eased out of competitive BMX. He lives in Northern California today.

The 2016 retro signature frame

In 2016, Gary Turner — founder of GT Bicycles, the "T" in GT — partnered with Tommy on a retro signature frame. They took the original 1988 20-inch Brackens Brand race frame and scaled it up to 26-inch and 24-inch cruiser sizes. Full 4130 chromoly, built by Gary Turner himself, sold through GT1972.com.

The detail that mattered was Gary Turner welding the frames with his own hands. Turner was in his 80s by then, back in his garage building bikes, and choosing to reconnect with Tommy specifically — a rider he'd signed to GT in the back of a plane after Torker folded 32 years earlier — said something about what the GT team really was in that era. A family.

Legacy

Tommy Brackens sits in a specific spot in BMX history. One of the handful of true World Champions out of the first generation of the sport. One of the most-liked riders of the decade. And the founder of a small but real BMX company that gave Kevin "Sheepdog" Hull a factory home after GT and later launched Eric Carter's pro career. Eight years of racing, a title at the top level internationally, and he walked away to go back to motorcycles on his own terms.

He matters as part of a bigger story too. Team Jag — Tommy Brackens, Anthony Sewell, and Tuni Henry, with Renny Roker out front — was one of the first organized efforts to bring Black riders into BMX at the factory-team level. Two of those three became World Champions. All three are in or right next to the Hall of Fame. That lineage still matters, and Tommy is central to it.

And the holeshots. Forty years on, if you ask anyone who raced against Tommy Brackens at a national from 1982 to 1987 what they remember, you get the same answer every time. He was gone before anyone else cleared the gate. The Human Dragster was never a marketing nickname. It was a job description.

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