TW Racing — The Brand That Taught Pete Loncaravich's Geometry (1979–1981)
TW Racing
A BMXRacingHistory.com preview · hosted on Legend Bike Co
The Brand That Taught Pete Loncaravich's Geometry — 1979 to 1981
We're telling this story the same way we told the others: neutrally. No brand gets elevated. No rider gets shorted. Where the record is thin, we say so. Where Bill Ryan's firsthand memory fills a gap the published record doesn't cover, we cite him directly.
What TW actually was
TW Racing was a small Northern California BMX brand active from around 1979 through 1981. The name came from its two partners: James Taylor and Brian Wimple. Both names appear in the only surviving brand-history references on BMXmuseum.com. The second partner's name is sometimes spelled "Whimple." The company was based in Walnut Creek, California, in the East Bay east of San Francisco — well outside the Southern California cluster where most of the early BMX brands lived.
TW did not weld its own frames. Production was contracted out to DG / Green Duck in Ramona, California — the same Southern California shop that built DG's own bikes and that ran the mild-steel SE Basher and the 26" OM Flyer for SE Racing in the same window. TW designed and shipped; Green Duck welded. That arrangement was standard practice for first-wave BMX brands.
The frame
The TW race frame had two design features that set it apart from the rest of the 1980 chromoly field: an elliptical top tube and a dual down tube configuration. The twin down tubes ran from the head tube to the bottom bracket and gave the front triangle a distinctive silhouette. A loop-tail variant appears in surviving photos on BMXmuseum.com but is rare. The geometry was conservative for the era — a tight, short bike sized for the 12-to-14-year-old riders who made up the bulk of the BMX class field in 1980. That geometry is the part that matters for what came next.
The factory team
TW's factory team was small. The rider whose presence on TW is documented in the published record is Pete "Pistol Pete" Loncaravich — sponsored from December 1979 through September 1980, when he was 13 turning 14, racing the 14 Expert class. TW was Pete's third factory sponsor — after Cook Bros (1977) and S&S Performance (1978). His next sponsor after TW was Diamond Back, where he stayed from September 1980 through his pro debut in December 1982.
Bill Ryan also recalls Denny Davidow riding for TW during the same window. Davidow is best known for his subsequent ride with GT Bicycles starting in 1980. Davidow's TW ride is not independently documented in the surviving published record. We are noting it on Bill's authority.
A third name Bill recalls from the TW team is Fred Becker. We have not been able to confirm Becker through any independent source. If you have a TW ad or race photo with Becker on it, please get in touch.
Pete's father, the partnership, and the $5,000
The piece of TW history that gets retold the most is the way the partnership ended. Pete Loncaravich's father was not James Taylor and was not Brian Wimple — TW was not founded by the Loncaravich family. But Pete's father was a business partner in TW, working alongside Taylor and Wimple on the financial side. That's how Pete ended up with the factory ride at 13.
In September 1980, the partnership came apart. The contemporaneous account, published in BMX Plus! April 1984 Vol. 7 No. 4 page 48 and later carried in Pete's Wikipedia entry, is that Pete's father's TW partners disappeared with US$5,000 of his money. Pete stopped racing for TW, picked up Diamond Back, and that was effectively the end of TW Racing as a going concern.
The advertising — what survives
TW Racing's print presence was thin. Bill recalls a single TW ad in BMX Action magazine from around 1980 — the only TW ad he can remember seeing in any of the period magazines. The exact issue has not yet been pinned through the oldschoolmags.com BMX Action PDF archive.
Why TW matters — the geometry lineage
TW would be a footnote in BMX history if Pete Loncaravich had not gone on to do what he did. He didn't stop with TW. He spent 1980–82 on Diamond Back, turned pro in December 1982, rode SE for a single weekend in early 1983, and then sat down with his father to design their own race frame: the LRP, Loncaravich Racing Products.
The geometry on the LRP came from the TW. Pete didn't start with a blank sheet. He started with the bike that taught him how to race at age 12. He and his father refined what TW had built, added the gusset TW didn't have, dropped the loop-tail design, and shipped the LRP under their own name in 1983. That frame got Pete to the AA Pro class. CW Racing signed him a few months later, made him shut LRP down as a condition of the contract, and the rest of the story is told on the LRP page.
Forty years later, Pete and Bill Ryan brought LRP back under the Legend Bike Co. banner, built on updated Supercross BMX geometry that traces — through the original LRP — back to the TW. The bike you can buy from Legend today has the TW frame in its family tree.
Where TW sits in the broader BMX picture
TW belongs to the first wave of dedicated BMX brands that sprang up between 1977 and 1981 — the window that gave the sport SE Racing, Redline, JMC, Mongoose, Diamond Back, Torker, Webco, Schwinn's BMX line, and the early CW, Hutch, and GT. Most of those brands had a Southern California address. TW had none of those advantages.
What we still don't know
- The exact founding date and the exact date the brand wound down.
- The total number of frames TW shipped.
- The full factory team roster beyond Pete Loncaravich.
- The exact BMX Action issue that carried the TW ad.
- What happened to James Taylor and Brian Wimple after September 1980.
Sources
BMXmuseum.com — TW Racing brand page. Wikipedia — Pete Loncaravich, citing BMX Plus! April 1984 Vol. 7 No. 4 page 48 for the TW sponsorship dates and the $5,000 partnership account. Legend Bike Co. SE Racing history for the Green Duck context. Legend Bike Co. LRP history for the TW-to-LRP geometry lineage. oldschoolmags.com BMX Action archive.
Primary-source recollection: Bill Ryan, founder of Supercross BMX and co-owner of Legend Bike Co., on TW as one of Pete Loncaravich's first sponsors at age 12, the TW factory team including Denny Davidow and Fred Becker, and the TW-to-LRP-to-modern-LRP geometry lineage.