Originally Posted by MadNachos

Forgive the response to a very old post but I thought it important to clear a few things up since I was heavily involved with GT over many years when they were still making good bikes.

Gary was not a pro drag racer that decided to build his son a better BMX bike. The real story is that Gary started working as a welder at a company in So Cal when he returned from Vietnam making brass instruments. He did not get big into drag racing until Rich had been running GT for a while so he could 'step back' and not be bothered with the day to day BS. He just did what he wanted and what he wanted was to run his pro-alcohol dragster team. But this was decades after GT was off and running.

Rich and Gary were already millionaires when the company went public. And then some. When Rich was still alive we grew 10-15% a year (over decades) and since we also owned the largest bicycle parts distributor in the world we were doing well over $200M a year in sales. Rich and Gary had been very wealthy for quite a few years by that point.

Also, BMX did not start to decline like mentioned and certainly had nothing to do with developing our first mountain bikes, it was simply evolution. At the time most MTBs were made like road bikes...lugs and brazing was the norm. We were already very skilled at working with 6061 from all of the mini BMX race frames we had been making so the leap to making aluminum MTB frames was super logical. And we had plenty of BMX and freestyle riders to beat the hell out of our initial prototype MTB designs so we had a leg up on everyone else. We did TIG welded MTB frames when that was unusual, made carbon frames in the USA when it was unheard of, and ramped up to have the largest Ti fabrication facility in the bike biz shortly after that.

GT was killing it.