One of the great joys of riding is getting a custom race suit. One of the worst things in riding is wrecking said suit. A custom race suit is a beautiful thing, it’s made just for you and only you, and although it’s there to save your ass when you hit the deck, the fact remains it’s a sad sight when you hang your now trashed leathers on the garage wall.
I did exactly this when I smashed up my custom Pilot suit I use for supermoto racing in the middle of the year. Josh at Pilot had made me this suit for the 2017 Suzuki GSX-R1000R intro at COTA, but it’d since become my race suit as newer ones in my collection started to get used more.
I love that Pilot suit. It looks awesome and fits like a glove, so when I crashed out of race two in the first WAR Supermoto race of this year, I was rather annoyed.
Getting a new suit was out of the question, so I dropped the blue leathers off at Anthony’s Leather Works in the ritzy SoCal location of Corona Del Mar. The shop sticks out like a sore thumb among the upper-class skincare and real estate establishments that populate the region, with Max Biaggi’s stand up wheelie poster gloriously filling the shop window facing the Pacific Coast Highway.
Greg Sermabeikian is the man responsible for this little biking corner of Corona Del Mar, but he also repairs anything made of leather, from Gucci handbags to wallets, pants and of course, expensive shoes. Personally, I thought my suit was going to be at least a big job, if not trashed.
“We get that a lot with shoes,” says Greg. “Sometimes people come in with shoes they think we can’t repair, and they don’t come and pick them up. When we call them and they see the job we do, they can’t believe it.”
Leather race suits are all different, so repairs vary from one brand to another. A Dainese suit is constructed differently to an Alpinestars suit and indeed my Pilot suit, and there’s a definite art form to what Greg and his boys do.
“We can do everything to do with the suit,” says Greg. “A lot of the time, a suit just needs a really good clean for it to look like new, especially if the leather is of good quality. You’d be amazed at how good a suit can be once you give it a bit of TLC.”
Anthony’s Leather Works is accredited by Dainese as one of a very select group of outside retailers qualified by the company to work on their suits, which is getting even more technical now airbag suits are starting to come through his shop. He also does Alpinestars motocross boot resoling, so even though it’d be nice to get a new pair of Tech 10’s, Greg can essentially make your boots almost new for less than half the cost.
My race suit needed a new patch down the backside; the Cycle News logo on the right arm was destroyed; the yellow stripe (I thought) on the back was wrecked; and the leather needed color matching and painting. Luckily the zippers on the suit were in good condition, but I’ll admit I had my doubts as to how well they could color match the dye required to fix up the gravel rash, because the color of the suit is mix of the 2017 Suzuki GSX-R1000 blue and the 2017 Yamaha YZF-R6 blue, as I had both those intros back-to-back and wanted one suit to look good for each bike.
As you can see from the photos below, the job done by Greg and his crew at Anthony’s Leather Works was outstanding, and aside from the missing Cycle News logo on the right arm, you’d never know I went tumbling down the road in this suit at about 30 mph. All up, this repair cost $300, which about one sixth of the cost of a new custom Pilot suit.
If you want to get your suit looking new, you can get hold of Greg and the crew on (949) 486-9000, or at anthonysleatherworks.com.
