Kenny Bernstein: : He’s a Salesman in the Super-Fast Lane

Kenny Bernstein is forgiving of those who expect drag racing’s funny car champion to be a guy with a two-day beard and grease up to his elbows.

“We all started that way,” he says, smiling.

Bernstein is always smiling. He probably smiles more than Magic Johnson and Mary Lou Retton. He’ll smile until his teeth fall out, then paint his gums white and smile some more.

Drag racing has its legends, such as Don Garlits and Shirley Muldowney, whom Bernstein acknowledges, but he is the sport’s man for the ‘80s, a time when it takes grit and guts and salesmanship to go fast.

Marketing and public relations, those are Bernstein’s strengths, as much as guiding a 270-m.p.h. projectile down a quarter-mile of blacktop. Away from his Newport Beach home and his shop in Orange, he travels with a black leather briefcase, not a box of tools, and is as quick with a handshake as he is with his throttle foot.

He greets people as would the owner of a restaurant, or a guy selling clothes, which, it so happens, is where he got the practice.

“When I was a kid I played with cars and hot rods,” Bernstein said from behind the desk of his carpeted, air-conditioned office. “Even in the early years of drag racing I’d work with the crews, but I learned really quick that, for me, the side that made more sense was the public relations side.

“You base everything around what you can do for the sponsor. You’ve gotta get a lot of exposure for the companies you represent. The better you do that, the better chances are for them staying around.

“If you win, it’s icing on the cake, but don’t base it all on winnings, because you’re not going to get there. The winnings are few and far between. It’s hard to win day in and day out.”

Tell that to his rivals. Bernstein, 42, is the National Hot Rod Assn. Winston world champion two years running and has dusted the field by winning three of the first five national events this year, plus an invitational at Dallas, where he smoked a track-record run of 5.364 seconds. That’s the best elapsed time ever by a funny car, but it’s unofficial because it wasn’t achieved in open competition.

Bernstein set the official NHRA record of 5.482 seconds in the Winternationals at Pomona last February. In the ’86 U.S. Nationals, he became the first funny car driver to top 270 m.p.h. when he hit 271.4, but that wasn’t official because he failed to back it up. To be official, a driver must have another run within 1% of the record during the same competition.

His most recent success was in the Cajun Nationals at Baton Rouge, La., May 31. Last weekend, in the Springnationals at Columbus, Ohio, he lost to Don (Snake) Prudhomme in the quarterfinals when his car’s engine failed.

It’s easily Bernstein’s fastest start in a sport where a fast start is everything, and the man never stops. Besides racing his Budweiser King funny car for King Entertainment, Inc., he runs three other companies and is host on a weekly TV show on ESPN. His life must seem like someone flipping channels, occasionally settling on one at fast forward.

“Last year I was on the road 250 days out of the year,” he said. “This year doesn’t look quite that bad. I have an airplane. I don’t fly it. It’s kept in Indianapolis because of our office there with King Sports Inc., which is a sports marketing, promotions, public relations company. That company really uses it.”

There also is King Racing Components, Inc., of Texas, which exclusively markets RacePak computers, and King Racing, Inc., a NASCAR team that runs the Quaker State car with Morgan Shepherd.

“A lot of people make this whole thing work,” Bernstein said. “There are four companies and they’ve all got key personnel.

“I’d like to go into other forms of racing--either GTP, IMSA or Indianapolis--but two things have to happen. You have to have the personnel to do it right, and there’s the financing.

“I hate to think what it takes to run all those companies. I have no idea. It’ll cost around a million dollars a year to run this drag racing operation. It’ll cost about a million-eight to run the NASCAR deal.”

It’s difficult to win enough in NASCAR to break even, but it’s tough in drag racing, too, Bernstein said. “You can’t come close. You have to have the sponsors, unless you’re a multi-millionaire, which I’m not.”

So he sells his sport and himself.

“I enjoy doing PR. Many athletes and drivers, in particular, don’t enjoy talking to the public or looking into a camera. They just don’t feel comfortable. I feel it’s part of the job.

“I would be just as excited about sitting in a room with dignitaries from different companies--say the vice presidents of marketing of Budweiser, Buick and Quaker State, which we’ve done many times--and put together a package of cooperative efforts in marketing and advertising to promote their involvement.

“My one concern when I brought in Budweiser was, ‘How can I help sell beer?’ I’ve gotta sell beer. Same thing with Quaker State. How can I sell oil for those people?

“A couple years ago, when we won the first world championship, we were able to put Budweiser, Motorcraft and Ford together and talk them into spending $400,000 to advertise that championship. I get as much excitement and satisfaction out of that as I do winning a race.”

Bernstein grew up in Lubbock, Tex., which inspired another native son, Mac Davis, to sing, “Happiness Is Lubbock in the Rear View Mirror.”

“Yeah,” Bernstein said, “it looks great that way. There’s some good people from Lubbock. Buddy Holly. Mac Davis. Donnie Anderson, who played for the Green Bay Packers. Yeah, Lubbock’s well represented out there.

“I had an interesting call the other day from the Lubbock Avalanche Journal. The man (said): ‘I guess you’re not real excited about coming back and visiting Lubbock, are ya?’ I said, ‘Well, it doesn’t quite compare with Newport Beach.’

“They had a place right outside of town we always went to race. It was just a country road, a farm-to-market road. We had the quarter mile marked off with white paint. We had starters and the whole thing until the cops would come, and then we’d all scatter and run like hell.

“Many a night, on Friday and Saturday night, that’s where you were until you got run off. I had a couple, three different types of Chevies, a little ’56 Thunderbird, but the best car I had in those days that really ran quick was the ’58 Chevrolet. An Impala. Had a 348-cubic inch Chevy in it.

“Those cars were our everyday cars. We had a routine, like everybody. We went around a little drive-in called the Hideeho, then rode about three miles to the Carnation, and then back four or five more miles to the Mill. Of course, you’d run into the cars that you wanted to race, you’d make a little wager and off you’d go to the farm-to-market road, and everybody’d follow you out there.

“I was really glad to see those days end with the development of drag strips, because it was dangerous and it wasn’t smart, what we did. But we didn’t have anywhere to race. That was how drag racing started.”

Lots of people in and around Lubbock punch cows for a living, but that’s not what drove Bernstein away.

“I’m supposed to be in the department store business, selling the clothes, and I did,” he said. “I grew up in that business. My dad was in the retail business for years.

“I went about three year to college at Arlington State outside Dallas. Business administration. I wasn’t a real good student. My last year in college, I decided I needed to be in Bakersfield, Calif., at a drag race during final examinations, and the dean decided that maybe I should take a vacation.”

In 1973 Bernstein took five years off from racing to try the restaurant business, building a single Chelsea Street Pub in Lubbock into a chain of 16, but in ’78 he sold out the straight life for good. He also tried marriage but is now divorced, with a son, 14, living in Dallas.

For a change of pace, when he’s at home Bernstein usually drives a red ’34 Ford coupe. Custom-built by a friend in Tulsa, Okla., it has air conditioning, automatic transmission, digital instruments and would cost a collector about $50,000.

Bernstein drives it very carefully.

“A lot of people think that because you’re a race driver, you want go go fast all the time,” he said. “I think if I weren’t a race driver, I’d be a maniac on the freeways. I’d be a frustrated driver that wanted to be a race car driver, knowing me.

“But I’ve had my fun on the weekend, going 200. You don’t impress me a whole lot with a car that goes from zero to 60 in 10 seconds.”