Originally Posted by mswantak
That jibes with the story my LBS guy -- a longtime Raleigh dealer -- told me. I believe the date would be 1979 though, not 1969. There was no TI-Raleigh as such until 1972, and I've got what's left of one of the phony GPs, and the components are mid to late '70s.
Numerous sources (Retro-Raleigh, Tony Hadland, etc.) state the TI-Raleigh merger as being 1960, so Berto's date could well be correct. I know that the first Centrurions appeared well before 1979, as I have seen several references to Centurion bicycles in magazines from the early 1970s. However, Centurion did not receive national recognition until the late 1970s. In the early 1970s, distribution was restricted primarily to California.