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Studebaker Avanti

Avanti
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A sports car produced by Studebaker. Produced for the 1963 and 1964 model years. A total of 4,643 were produced, 3,834 for 1963 and 809 for 1964. The main difference between the model years is that the 1963 had round headlight bezels, the 1964 had square headlight bezels.

Raymond Loewy supervised design of the car, and his team included Tom Kellogg, Bob Andrews and John Ebstein. They began work in a rented house near Palm Springs, California on March 19, 1961. It took just five weeks to design the car from beginning to production approval.

The engine came in five versions. The R1 was the basic Avanti with a Studebaker 289 cubic inch V8 engine producing 240 horsepower. The R2 added a supercharger for 290 horsepower. The R3 was a low-volume supercharged version with 335 horsepower. The R4 was experimental, a naturally-aspirated V8 with dual 4-barrel carburetors producing 280 horsepower. The R5 was a V8 with dual superchargers, fuel injection, and 575 horsepower.

The head engineer of the car was Gene Hardig, who would also go on to work on the Avanti II project.

After production ended, two Indiana Studebaker dealers (Nate Altman and Leo Newman) bought the rights to the car and began producing it as the Avanti II.

Prominent Avanti owners include Ian Fleming and Ricky Nelson.

The official magazine of the Avanti Owners Association International is Avanti Magazine.

History

The following section is an excerpt from Wikipedia's Studebaker Avanti page on 6 April 2016, text available via the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The Studebaker Avanti is a personal luxury coupe that was built by the Studebaker Corporation between June 1962 and December 1963. The automaker referred to the Avanti as "America's Only 4 Passenger High-Performance Personal Car" in its sales literature.

Design

The Avanti was developed at the direction of the automaker's president, Sherwood Egbert. "The car's design theme is the result of sketches Egbert "doodled" on a jet-plane flight west from Chicago 37 days after becoming president of Studebaker in February 1961." Designed by Raymond Loewy's team of Tom Kellogg, Bob Andrews, and John Ebstein on a 40-day crash program, the Avanti featured a radical fiberglass body design mounted on a modified Studebaker Lark Daytona 109-inch convertible chassis powered by a modified 289 Hawk engine.

The designers worked feverishly and in just eight days finished a "clay scale model with two different sides: one a two-place sports car, the other a four-seat GT coupe." Tom Kellogg, a young California stylist hired for this project by Loewy, "felt it should be a four-seat coupe." "Loewy envisioned a low-slung, long-hood/short-deck semi-fastback coupe with a grilleless nose and a wasp-waisted curvature to the rear fenders, suggesting a supersonic aircraft."

The Avanti's complex body shape "would have been both challenging and prohibitively expensive to build in steel." Instead, Studebaker selected to mold the exterior panels in glass-reinforced plastic (fiberglass) and outsourced the work to Molded Fibreglass Body (MPG) in Ashtabula, Ohio, the same company that built the fibreglass panels for the Chevrolet Corvette in 1953.

The Avanti came standard with front disc-brakes that were British Dunlop designed units, made under license by Bendix, "the first American production model to offer them." It was one of the first bottom breather designs where instead of a conventional grille, air for the front mounted engine enters from under the front of the vehicle, a design feature much more common after the 1980s. A Paxton supercharger was offered as an option.

Photographs

	1963 Photo by "Morven" From a Studebaker show in Anaheim, California May 25, 2003 View photo of 1963 Studebaker Avanti - 61KB Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".
	1963, One Owner Car Photo ©2013 Bill Crittenden 2013 The Cars Time Forgot View photo of 1963 Studebaker Avanti - 3.6MB
	1963, One Owner Car Photo ©2013 Bill Crittenden 2013 The Cars Time Forgot View photo of 1963 Studebaker Avanti - 1.8MB
	1963, One Owner Car Photo ©2013 Bill Crittenden 2013 The Cars Time Forgot View photo of 1963 Studebaker Avanti - 5.3MB
	1963, One Owner Car Photo ©2013 Bill Crittenden 2013 The Cars Time Forgot View photo of 1963 Studebaker Avanti - 3.0MB
	1963, One Owner Car Photo ©2013 Bill Crittenden 2013 The Cars Time Forgot View photo of 1963 Studebaker Avanti - 2.8MB
	1963, One Owner Car Photo ©2013 Bill Crittenden 2013 The Cars Time Forgot View photo of 1963 Studebaker Avanti - 3.1MB
	1963, One Owner Car Photo ©2013 Bill Crittenden 2013 The Cars Time Forgot View photo of 1963 Studebaker Avanti - 3.1MB
	1963, One Owner Car Photo ©2013 Bill Crittenden 2013 The Cars Time Forgot View photo of 1963 Studebaker Avanti - 3.3MB
	1963, One Owner Car Photo ©2013 Bill Crittenden 2013 The Cars Time Forgot View photo of 1963 Studebaker Avanti - 2.9MB
	1963, One Owner Car Photo ©2013 Bill Crittenden 2013 The Cars Time Forgot View photo of 1963 Studebaker Avanti - 4.7MB
	1963 Photo ©2009 Bill Crittenden The Cars Time Forgot Car Show View photo of 1963 Studebaker Avanti - 3,884KB
	1963 Photo ©2009 Bill Crittenden The Cars Time Forgot Car Show View photo of 1963 Studebaker Avanti - 5,127KB
	1963 Photo ©2009 Bill Crittenden The Cars Time Forgot Car Show View photo of 1963 Studebaker Avanti - 3,193KB
	1963 Photo ©2009 Bill Crittenden The Cars Time Forgot Car Show View photo of 1963 Studebaker Avanti - 3,404KB
	1963 Photo ©2009 Bill Crittenden The Cars Time Forgot Car Show View photo of 1963 Studebaker Avanti - 3,765KB
	1963 Photo ©2009 Bill Crittenden The Cars Time Forgot Car Show View photo of 1963 Studebaker Avanti - 3,069KB
	1964 Four-Door Prototype Photo ©2016 Heidi Walczak View photo of 1964 Avanti Four-Door Prototype at the Studebaker National Museum - 1.5MB
	Photo ©2016 Heidi Walczak View photo of Studebaker Avanti at the Studebaker National Museum - 1.7MB
	Photo ©2016 Heidi Walczak View photo of Studebaker Avanti at the Studebaker National Museum - 1.0MB
	Photo ©2003 Heidi Walczak June 12, 2003 View photo of Studebaker Avanti - 440KB
	Heidi Walczak with the Avanti Photo ©2003 Bill Crittenden View photo of Studebaker Avanti - 451KB
	New Avanti Photo by Heidi Walczak 2002 Chicago Auto Show View photo of New Studebaker Avanti - 801KB
	Photo ©2004 Bill Crittenden 2004 Chicago Auto Show View photo of New Avanti Convertible - 718KB
	Photo ©2004 Bill Crittenden 2004 Chicago Auto Show View photo of New Avanti Convertible - 745KB

Merchandise

Type & Item #	Name	Details
Die Cast - Hot Wheels T9725-09A0C	Studebaker Avanti	Treasure Hunts, small scale, gold w/white stripes
Model Kit - AMT 30268	1963 Studebaker Avanti	Millenium, 1:25 scale