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[MG Brown]

 
August "Augie" Uihlein Pabst Jr. passed away after a short illness on October 9 2024.

Pabst was born on November 25, 1933. He is a paternal great-grandson of two Milwaukee beer magnates: Pabst Brewing Company founder Frederick Pabst, and Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company owner and Uihlein family patriarch August Uihlein.
 
Pabst opened an import car dealership called Pabst Motors in Milwaukee. The car dealership began his involvement in motorsports.
 
In ten years of racing, he won two national championships — the 1959 USAC and 1960 SSCA road racing championships.
 
Pabst made one NASCAR start on November 3, 1963 at Riverside International Raceway's Golden State 400. He started 18th and finished 35th (clutch) in the one-off event. Other sports car "ringers" participating in the event were, Dave MacDonald, Pete Brock, Bob Bondurant, and Ken Miles.
 
Biography by by Tom Schultz.

Augie Pabst's racing career lasted only ten years. During those years, he won numerous races, took two major Championships, and became one of the most popular and charismatic drivers of the day.
 
Augie's involvement with racing began when he founded Pabst Motors, an imported car dealership on Milwaukee's east side. He started racing in May, 1956, with a Triumph TR-3, moving up to an AC Ace-Bristol the next year. Augie had several class victories in both cars before buying a 2.5 liter Ferrari TR for 1958. In this car he won the first of many National races, winning the Milwaukee SCCA National over a field of much bigger cars.
 
He continued in the Ferrari the next season, placing well in several major events, before he received a career-changing call from Harry Heuer, who owned the Meister Brauser Team and had just purchased a Scarab. Would Augie drive it? Of course, he would.

 

 

Pabst quickly won the Meadowdale and Vaca Valley rounds of the USAC Road Racing Championship and, combined with points scored earlier in the season, won the 1959 USAC Championship.

 

Success continued in 1960 as Pabst won SCCA National races at Road America, Meadowdale, Watkins Glen, El Paso, and Daytona, winning the SCCA Championship and being named the Competition Press Driver of the Year.
 
Augie Pabst Jr., in the iconic Meister Brauser Scarab, cut a swath through US racing and became one of the premier stars of American sports car racing. Among the classic racing cars driven by Augie were the Birdcage Maserati, Cunningham, Lola Coupe, Ferrari, and the Meister Brauser Scarab.

 

 
The next two years saw Pabst drive for Briggs Cunningham, winning his first Road America 500 and placing fourth overall at Le Mans, both times in the ungainly rear-engine V-12 Maserati T-63.
 
A severe crash at Daytona in February 1962, when a blown engine in a Maserati caused an end-over-end crash, put Pabst out of action for many months, but he came back in 1963, now driving for the Mecom Racing Team. A win in the GT category at the Sebring 12 hours started the year, and he added a great win in the Continental Divide USRRC in a one-off return to the now obsolete Meister Brauser Scarab.
 
A second win in the Road America 500, plus the Nassau Tourist Trophy race, followed. The 500 win was especially noteworthy as Augie drove the first half of the race in a Mecom Ferrari, then relieved Bill Wuesthoff in the small 1.8 liter Elva Porsche, bringing that car home first in a giant killer role. The fact that he was co-driving with Wuesthoff, who was his driving school instructor, made the win even sweeter.
 
Augie won his third Road America 500 the following year in a season where he was dogged by mechanical failures. He formed his team in 1965, ordering a new McLaren. Unfortunately, the McLaren was very late in coming, and when it did, it was destroyed by a fire at Mosport.
 
After this, his career wound down, and an executive position with Pabst Brewery precluded any further racing.
 
When Pabst left the Brewery in 1983, he entered vintage racing, driving his old Scarab, which he had purchased earlier.
 
Pabst was inducted into the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America in 2011. The inductee class of 2011 of the HoF were Donnie Allison, Sid Collins, Roger McCluskey, Ed McCulloch, Augie Pabst, Bruce Penhall, and Ed Winfield.
 
Pabst was married to Joan and, until very recently, had kept busy with his classic sports car collection, his directorship of Road America, and the development of the Pabst Farms property.
 
The family racing tradition continues as August Pabst III manages the Pabst Racing Team in the USF2000 and USF Pro 2000 series. Sam Corry won the 2024 USF2000 championship for the Pabst Racing Team.
 

 
And yes, exactly according to legend, Augie drove his Ford rental car into the Mark Thomas Hotel pool in Monterey, CA in October of 1961, on a bet.

 
As more information is known, it will be added to this thread.

[SpeedyNH]

There are stories about Augie in Chris Economaki's book including the swimming pool incident.

 

It was a "rent it here, leave it there" deal, and when he turned in the keys he told 'em which hotel he'd left it at. 

[MG Brown]

Heres a great video.

[Dave Crevie]

One of the last of the "Gentlemen racers". Met Augie many times over the years, mostly at vintage racing events.

 

Anytime you got Augie, Hal Ulrich, Art Blye and Wally Mitchell together, you were in for hours of great conversation about the early years of racing in North America. 

 

You meet people in your lifetime that you wish will never die. Augie is one of those. But some wishes just can't come true.

[MG Brown]

Augie Pabst Jr. spent part of his racing career driving a Scarab sponsored by the Peter Hand Brewing Company of Chicago who among their brands was Meister Brau Light, a low calorie beer that was created using a unique recipe.

Here is the story of Meister Brau Light as documented in "All About Beer" magazine.
 

Turning on the Lite: The Origins of Miller Lite and Light Beer
 

The story is more complicated, of course. Miller obtained the recipe for what became Miller Lite through its takeover of the bankrupt Meister Brau brewery in Chicago. Meister Brau, in turn, had gotten the recipe from the Rheingold Brewery in Brooklyn, where biochemist Joseph Owades devised a way to isolate an enzyme that could break down higher-calorie starches to make them easier for yeast to gobble up.

 

What Rheingold dubbed Gablinger’s Diet Beer famously flopped in the late 1960s—no one wanted to drink a diet beer.

 

Curiously, Mister Brau also tried marketing Owades’ recipe as a diet beer called Mister Brau Lite despite Gablinger’s brief history; Mister Brau Lite flopped, too.

 

Murphy, Miller’s president, knew any reiteration of Mister Brau wasn’t going to work as a diet beer. There had to be another angle. The brewery discontinued Mister Brau Lite and, following Murphy’s Munich epiphany, began retooling the image of not only Miller’s low-calorie offering, but of low-calorie beers in general.

 

Miller tweaked Owades’ recipe to produce, in the brewery’s words, “a low-calorie brew that tasted like beer,” and, together with its Manhattan advertising firm, McCann Erickson, scrapped everything diet-related. Instead, beginning with test marketing in 1973, they hired ex-pro athletes to tout the beer’s drinkability. Out went Miller’s longtime tag, “The Champagne of Beers.” In came “Great Taste, Less Filling” and “Everything You Always Wanted in a Beer. And Less.”

 

Miller Lite, launched in those white-label bottles as well as white cans in early 1975, was an immediate smash, propelling Miller into the No. 2 market-share spot behind archrival Anheuser-Busch, which felt compelled to introduce its own light-beer brand, Natural Light, in 1977. (In January, MillerCoors rolled out Miller Lite in the original white cans to a strong commercial reception. The white-label bottles were replaced in the late 1990s and haven’t been seen since. Not only will they return  starting in late August, but MillerCoors spokesman Jonathan Stern emailed that “in October, you will see a new look on all Miller Lite packaging that includes a new bottle.”)

 

Far beyond the impact on the fortunes of its brewery, Miller Lite birthed the light-beer segment as well as spawned a mini-revolution in American food and drink. Suddenly, everything was light—or lite. “The word skittered across hundreds of new product labels (more than 350 in the first half of the eighties),” the New York Times noted in a 2002 obituary for John Murphy. “Light became lite and took on a life of its own.”

 

It was supremely ironic. Products as varied as pie fillings, barbecue sauce and soda touted their light/lite offerings as lower-calorie alternatives; or, as in the case of Diet Coke, introduced in 1982, simply slapped “diet” in the name. This straightforward approach, by and large, worked—just like it had not worked for light beer.

[MG Brown]

Official Obituary of

August "Augie" Pabst Jr.

November 25, 1933  -  October 9, 2024

 

https://www.pagenkop...0#/obituaryInfo