Image credit: 70sfunnycars.com

Aside from the newest of newcomers to the drag racing world, virtually everyone recalls the “beer wars” in Top Fuel that began in the late 1990’s and really heated up in the early 2000’s when the Budweiser team of Kenny Bernstein and the Miller crew of Larry Dixon traded blows and fought tooth and nail week in and week out on the NHRA trail. But the beer wars didn’t begin there.

The car generally credited with starting the whole beer wars concept was in fact Racine, Wisconin’s Charlie Proite and his “Pabst Blue Ribbon Charger,” which was driven by a young driver named Russell Long, just 20 years old at the time.

Proite entered the world of drag racing in 1957 as an owner and crew chief, and built his first car, an A/GAS Supercharged ’57 Chevy in 1960 and campaigned it around the Midwest until ’62. That same year, Charlie purchased a complete Top Fuel operation from Chris Karamesines, named it the “Telstar,” and remained in Top Fuel until 1971, when his passion became Funny Cars.

In 1973, Proite debuted a new Charger-bodied flopper with Gary Bailey handling the driving shores. As the story goes, Proite and Bailey got into a scuffle during a race at Great Lakes Dragaway in Wisconsin, and Long, in attendance at that race driving another car, asked Proite if he could drive for him. Long borrowed an old truck from Schumacher to haul the car and Proite got sponsorship from Pabst Blue Ribbon, and the rest was history.

Image credit: telstarracing.com

Super Stock & Drag illustrated magazine reported at the time that Priote had negotiated with racing buff Augie Pabst for six months to close the deal on the brewery sponsorship, considered to be the first major non-automotive sponsorship in drag racing. Long, the youngest licensed nitro driver at the time, drove the Pabst Blue Ribbon Charger until 1975 when the car broke a crankshaft and crashed. In’76, Vic Cecelia replaced Long in the drivers seat and the Pabst sponsorship was gone, but the beer wars as they would come to be known were alive and well.