Kenny Bernstein
The Budweiser King Made Funny Cars Slippery, Top Fuel Faster, and 300 MPH Somebody Else’s Problem
Kenny Bernstein was born September 6, 1944, in Clovis, New Mexico, and grew up in Lubbock, Texas. Before drag racing became a full-time career, there were college classes, sales work, restaurant business and the usual problem of figuring out how to pay for race cars when race cars had absolutely no interest in paying for themselves.
Bernstein eventually solved that problem better than most. He became the Budweiser King, won four straight Funny Car championships, moved to Top Fuel and won two more, collected 69 NHRA national-event victories and became the first NHRA driver through the 300-mph barrier.
That would be enough for most careers. Bernstein also owned winning teams in NHRA, NASCAR and CART because one expensive form of motorsports evidently did not provide enough paperwork.
That was Kenny Bernstein. There were louder racers, wilder racers and plenty who looked more comfortable with grease under their fingernails. Bernstein usually looked like the fellow who had already read the contract, checked the sponsor obligations and asked the engineer what the wind tunnel had found.
Before There Was a King
Bernstein raced on and off before becoming a full-time professional Funny Car driver in the late 1970s. He returned seriously in 1978 with the Chelsea King Funny Car and won his first NHRA national event the following year.
Then, in 1980, Anheuser-Busch came aboard.
That changed considerably more than the paint job.
The Budweiser King
For a generation of drag-racing fans, Kenny Bernstein did not merely drive a Funny Car. He drove the Budweiser King.
The red-and-white cars became some of the most recognizable machines in the sport, and Bernstein understood earlier than most that a major sponsor was buying more than quarter-mile elapsed time. The transporter looked right. The cars looked right. The crew looked right. The sponsor was treated like a business partner rather than an ATM with decals.
Plenty of racers had sponsors. Bernstein built an identity, then made sure the identity kept showing up in winner’s circles and record books.
In 1983, Bernstein drove the Budweiser King to victory in both the Big Bud Shootout and the U.S. Nationals on the same weekend, the first Funny Car driver to pull off that double. In 1984, the car became the first Funny Car through the 260-mph barrier, running 260.11 mph at Gainesville.
By then it was becoming more than a beautifully prepared billboard with a nitro engine attached. It was becoming the car everybody else had to chase.
Dale Armstrong Started Asking Better Questions
The other enormous piece of the Kenny Bernstein story was Dale Armstrong.
Armstrong was one of those tuners who looked at an accepted way of doing something and immediately began wondering how many parts of it were wrong. During his years with Bernstein, the pair helped introduce or advance lockup clutches, onboard data recording, wind-tunnel development and other ideas that eventually became normal because everybody else got tired of being beaten by them.
That partnership turned the Budweiser King operation from a first-class race team into a laboratory with slicks.
Bernstein and Armstrong were paying serious attention to aerodynamics when plenty of Funny Car bodies were still shaped mostly by the requirement that the decals fit somewhere. Their Ford Tempo went into the wind tunnel and came out looking less like something Ford intended to sell and more like something Armstrong intended to push through the air very quickly.
Funny Cars were still supposed to resemble production cars. Bernstein and Armstrong regarded “resemble” as a negotiable term.
Four Championships in a Row
The payoff arrived in 1985, when Bernstein won his first NHRA Funny Car championship.
Then he won in 1986, 1987 and 1988.
Four straight championships, matching the four-year run Don Prudhomme had put together a decade earlier. This was not an era short on serious Funny Car racers. Mark Oswald, Billy Meyer, John Force, Prudhomme, Ed McCulloch and plenty of others were quite capable of making a weekend unpleasant.
The Budweiser King bunch simply made more weekends unpleasant for everybody else.
The championships were only part of it. In 1986, Bernstein became the first Funny Car driver under 5.50 seconds and the first over 270 mph. In 1987, he became the first under 5.40.
This was the period when the Budweiser King stopped being merely a famous race car and became one of the programs that defined Funny Car racing in the 1980s.
Then Came the Batmobile
The famous 1987 Buick LeSabre “Batmobile” was not the beginning of the Budweiser King story. It was what happened after Bernstein and Armstrong had already spent years making everybody else catch up.
The rear deck was enormous, the body shape worked every useful inch of the rulebook, and the whole thing looked like somebody had given an aerodynamicist a Buick and permission to become a nuisance.
It worked. Bernstein won seven of 14 races in 1987 and another championship. The car pushed Funny Car aerodynamics far enough that NHRA tightened the body rules afterward.
The Batmobile was the wildest expression of the larger Budweiser King program — a team that had already broken speed barriers, changed the way racers approached aerodynamics and professionalism, and was busy collecting four championships in a row.
The Batmobile was the exclamation point. The Budweiser King was the sentence.
He Left Funny Car While He Was Still Winning
After four consecutive Funny Car championships, Bernstein did something most racers would consider an unnecessary complication: he moved to Top Fuel.
Most people who have finally figured out how to beat nearly everybody do not immediately change classes and start learning another race car. Bernstein did.
By 1991 he had already become an NHRA winner in both Top Fuel and Funny Car, and that same year he won the U.S. Nationals in Top Fuel after having already won Indy twice in Funny Car.
The Budweiser King was now sitting behind the engine instead of in front of it.
Then came Gainesville.
301.70
Drag racing loves round numbers. Five seconds. Two hundred miles per hour. Three hundred miles per hour.
The car does not care whether the scoreboard says 299.99 or 300.01. People care.
By early 1992, several Top Fuel teams were crowding the 300-mph barrier. At Houston, Bernstein had run 296.93 mph while Mike Dunn reached 297.12. Everybody knew the number was coming.
On March 20, 1992, at the Gatornationals in Gainesville, Kenny Bernstein’s Dale Armstrong-tuned Budweiser King dragster ran 301.70 mph.
There it was. Three hundred had become history instead of a target.
Bernstein became “The King of Speed,” and the run became one of the defining moments in NHRA history. Some records last a weekend. This one became a dividing line.
Before Kenny Bernstein, nobody had run 300. After Kenny Bernstein, everybody wanted to.
Funny Car Champion Wasn’t Enough
Bernstein won his first Top Fuel championship in 1996, making him the first driver in NHRA history to win championships in both nitro categories. He did it again in 2001.
A Funny Car and a Top Fuel dragster share nitromethane, enormous horsepower and a general disagreement with common sense. They are not the same job. Bernstein became a champion in both.
His career total settled at 69 NHRA national-event wins — 30 in Funny Car and 39 in Top Fuel — with six championships overall.
There is not much wasted space in that résumé.
He Also Owned Everything Else
Bernstein’s ambitions did not stop at drag racing. His organizations competed in NASCAR and IndyCar, and he became the first team owner credited with victories in NHRA, NASCAR and CART. In 1992, the same year Bernstein broke 300 mph, his IndyCar operation put Roberto Guerrero on the pole for the Indianapolis 500.
That tells you more about Bernstein than another trophy does. He was not merely a driver who became a businessman because somebody had to sign the checks. He thought like an owner from the beginning.
Sponsors, personnel, engineering, presentation and long-term planning were all pieces of the same machine. Bernstein did not need the operation to look colorful or chaotic. He wanted it to look prepared.
There were louder racers. There were wilder racers. Bernstein generally looked like the fellow who had already read the contract.
Retirement Took a Couple of Attempts
Bernstein announced his retirement from driving after the 2002 season and turned the Budweiser Top Fuel car over to his son Brandon.
That lasted until Brandon was injured in 2003. Dad climbed back in and finished the season by winning four consecutive Top Fuel events.
That is not the usual substitute-driver arrangement.
Bernstein returned once more to Funny Car competition in 2007, but the comeback never approached the old Budweiser King domination, and he stepped away from driving again after the season. His racing operation continued until Bernstein left NHRA team ownership following the 2011 season.
By then there was not much left to prove.
The Bottom Line
The easiest way to remember Kenny Bernstein is the scoreboard: four straight Funny Car championships, two Top Fuel championships, 69 NHRA national-event wins and the first 300-mph run.
But that misses the thing that made Bernstein different.
The Budweiser King was one of drag racing’s defining programs because it joined Bernstein’s driving, Dale Armstrong’s engineering, major-league sponsorship and relentless attention to presentation into something that looked modern before much of the sport did.
The Tempo pushed aerodynamics forward. The Batmobile pushed the rulebook. The Top Fuel car pushed through 300 mph. Different machinery, same operation, same expectation that every piece of the program had a job to do.
Budweiser King was more than lettering on the side of Kenny Bernstein’s race cars.
For a long stretch of drag-racing history, it was a warning label.
↑ Back to the Top, Before Somebody Finds Another Rulebook Loophole