Heartbreaking: Mert Lawwill American motorcycle racer Just Passed Away At the Aged of 84…see..more…
When Si Paton reached out to us with, “the greatest barn find of all time,” it’s safe to say our interest was piqued. Si followed it up with this message, “Last week my email pinged, nothing unusual about that, I get a lot of emails each day as you can imagine. This one started to stand out halfway through the second line and then I looked at the pictures, surely this is too good to be true? This bike had been kept out of direct sunlight, hanging up in someone’s living room, out of reach and sight of the public eye, in the same condition as it left the factory. Was this the ‘Holy Grail’ of MTB retro? Read on and decide for yourself…”
That Holy Grail is the above Lawwill Knight Pro Cruiser that could be one of the most important bikes in European MTB history. Here’s the full story.
So the story goes, mountain biking truly began in the hills surrounding Farifax, Marin County in the early ’70s. Those Repack Races birthed the legends of our sport and laid the groundwork for the bikes we all know and enjoy today.
Those races may have been raced on converted beach cruisers but it wasn’t long until the riders started looking for something a bit more specialized for the task at hand. Joe Breeze, for example, was building his Breezer 1, often credited as the first mountain bike, from 1977 to 1978 but only 10 of these were apparently ever made. The first production mountain bike instead came from Mert Lawwill with 1978’s Lawwill Knight Pro Cruiser.
make flat-track Harley Davidsons. Aiming to capitalize on the booming BMX trend, the pair decided to make some bicycles but were convinced by a local shop to make a production run of mountain bikes instead of their smaller wheeled cousins.
Unfortunately, they immediately struck upon an issue. Mountain biking was such a young sport that nobody really knew what it was, including the dealers they were hoping to sell the frames to. To solve this problem, the bike was marketed as a cruiser, got named the Pro Cruiser and all of a sudden dealers were queuing up to put in an order.
As this article from the Radavist notes, the bike borrowed heavily from the worlds of BMX and motorbike racing and therefore a lot of the features on this bike were well ahead of their time including the 1x drivetrain, hub-mounted brakes, four-bolt handlebar stem, and extra-wide bars. In total, 12 batches of 50 frames were made before Mert pulled the plug in 1982 to return to motorcycle racing.
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