Mert Lawwill, a champion motorcycle racer who starred opposite Steve McQueen in the 1971 documentary “On Any Sunday,” and whose drive to improve anything on two wheels made him a pioneering designer of pedal-powered mountain bikes, died on May 6 in Meridian, Idaho. He was 85.
His death, at an assisted-living residence, was confirmed by his son, Joe Lawwill.
Taut and compact at 140 pounds in his prime, Mr. Lawwill raced Harley-Davidsons professionally from 1964 to 1977. He was the American Motorcyclist Association Grand National Champion in 1969, racing on dirt and paved tracks from Daytona Beach, Fla., to Sacramento.
“On Any Sunday,” the director Bruce Brown’s follow-up to his 1966 surfing classic, “The Endless Summer,” chronicled Mr. Lawwill’s daredevilry at 150 miles an hour through the 1970 racing season, when his bike displayed the No. 1 plate of the defending champion.
The film also featured Malcolm Smith, a dirt-track rider, and Mr. McQueen, a passionate racer in his own right, whose breakout movie role was in “The Great Escape” (1963), featuring an unforgettable motorcycle jump over the barbed wire of a German P.O.W. camp. (A stuntman did the leap, but Mr. McQueen was shown racing his Triumph bike in other scenes.)
“The world met Mert in 1971 when the movie ‘On Any Sunday’ came out,” John Parker, a fellow racer and bicycle designer, told Freehub magazine years later. “Mert was just a Friday night god. This giant of a man — for the movie, for having had the No. 1 plate, for being a factory Harley-Davidson rider — Mert was just on top of his game.”
Mr. Lawwill’s formal education ended with some mechanical engineering courses he took at a community college, but he was a natural designer who had a near obsession with improving the equipment he used.
He designed a racing motorcycle chassis that was “the benchmark for professional dirt track racing throughout the 1970s and 1980s,” according to The Radavist, a website about bicycle design.
Mr. Lawwill’s son, Joe, described him as “driven to make things better,” adding: “He couldn’t sit still and watch a movie. He needed to be focused on a goal.”
In 1977, drawing inspiration from motorcycles, BMX stunt bicycles and a new sport in Northern California that did not yet have a name but would eventually be called mountain biking, Mr. Lawwill designed the Pro Cruiser: a bicycle with fat tires, multiple gears and straight handlebars, designed to be ridden on dirt roads and trails. Built in small batches by Mr. Lawwill’s partner Terry Knight in Hayward, Calif., from 1978 to 1984, the Pro Cruiser is considered the first assembly-line mountain bike.
A few years later, after an uncomfortable ride on a mountain bike, Mr. Lawwill designed a suspension system for off-road bikes to cushion the pounding experienced by a cyclist descending a trail.
“I was coming down a cow trail, running 20 or 30 miles an hour,” he recalled in an interview with The Chicago Tribune in 1992. “It was rough; I was getting the heck beat out of me and my eyes were blurring. I said: ‘Boy, this is ridiculous! I could come down here at 60 miles an hour on my motorcycle and not think anything of it.’ That got me started on suspension for bicycles.”
His first design, the RS-1, with rear suspension, was produced by the pioneering California frame-maker Gary Fisher, who claims to have coined the term “mountain bike.” Bicycling magazine gave the design its Hot Bike Award in 1990.
Mr. Lawwill was also known as the designer of Mert’s Hands, a prosthetic device that allows amputees to grasp and steer a bicycle or motorcycle handlebar. It was inspired by Chris Draayer, a Harley-Davidson teammate who lost his left arm in a crash in the 1960s.
Merton Randolph Lawwill was born on Sept. 25, 1940, in Boise, Idaho, one of seven children of Rudy Lawwill, a house painter, and Thelma (Irish) Lawwill, a schoolteacher.
The family lived on a small farm surrounded by mountains, which offered lots of terrain for the teenage Mert on his first motorcycle, a Corgi. He competed in local races on a more powerful BSA 500 machine.
After graduating from Boise High School in 1959, he moved to Los Angeles to pursue motorcycle racing in a hotbed of the sport. Dudley Perkins, a Harley-Davidson dealer in San Francisco who supplied the California Highway Patrol with its bikes, offered Mr. Lawwill a sponsorship in 1963. The Harley-Davidson factory in Milwaukee became his second sponsor soon after.
During his professional career, Mr. Lawwill won 15 American Motorcyclist Association Grand National races. He was inducted into the AMA Motorcycle Hall of Fame in 1998, and into the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame in 1997.
Mr. Lawwill married June Spenger in 1968. She died in 2018. In addition to his son, Joe, he is survived by a daughter, Marcella Lawwill; three stepsons, Rick, Mike, and Tim Suchomel; three grandchildren; three step-granddaughters; and six siblings, Carolyn Dunlap, Leroy Lawwill, Anna Lawwill Culmer, Marian Nakagawa, Donna Call and Mary Pribble.
Mr. Brown, the documentary director, wanted “On Any Sunday” to show motorcycle racing as an exciting, clean-cut sport to challenge the common perception of bikers as outlaws in the Hells Angels mold. There is not a black leather jacket anywhere to be seen.
On his website, Mr. Brown described how a relative of Mr. Lawwill’s changed her mind about the sport after watching the movie.
“Being a motorcycle racer, he was sort of considered the black sheep of the family,” Mr. Brown said of Mr. Lawwill. “The old patriarch of the family, Lawwill’s grandmother-in-law, went to see the movie, and in the middle of one of the scenes featuring Lawwill she stood up and shouted, ‘That’s my grandson!’ Suddenly he was the big hero of the family.”
Trip Gabriel is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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