On a track bike, a rider cannot coast, and stopping requires locking up the rear wheel into a skid because there are no hand brakes. Unsurprisingly, high-speed pileups are a regular part of the Red Hook Criterium.

“You feel like it’s a bucking bronco when you first get on the bike,” said Gabe Lloyd, a road racer who crashed at the 2012 race. “The first time you come to a corner, it’s like, ‘Oh, God, where are the brakes?’ ”

Fixed-gear criteriums have become popular in recent years. Trimble said he had received hundreds of queries from organizers who were trying to organize new races, and he keeps a spreadsheet of 38 global races similar to his that have begun recently.

Kris Fay, who runs the Discovery Criterium in Sacramento and is planning three other fixed-gear races in Northern California, attributes the growth in part to Red Hook’s popularity.

“It’s definitely the first event to have pushed track bike criteriums to being as popular as they are,” he said. “It’s the first thing that comes to mind when I hear the word ‘crit.’ ”

The growth of fixed-gear racing has occurred without the oversight of USA Cycling, the sport’s national governing body. A spokesman said USA Cycling’s rules for road races require bicycles to have a freewheel and two brakes, which eliminates the fixed-gear format. Trimble said he had not asked USA Cycling to sanction his event.

“What we’re doing is new and different and doesn’t really fall into what USA Cycling is doing,” he said. “We feel like cycling can grow from a different angle.”