History/Breakdown: 1964 Studebaker Avanti Paxton Supercharged R2

Studebaker was closing its factory doors when it built this 1964 Avanti, yet somehow found the will to fit it with a supercharged R2 289 — one of the most advanced forced-induction engines any American manufacturer offered that year. This low-mileage example from the Brothers Collection is a rare survivor from a company that didn’t live to see the muscle car era it helped anticipate. It rarely gets called a muscle car, but the numbers say otherwise. Watch to see why.

Studebaker isn’t a name that comes up often in muscle car conversations, and that’s exactly why this 1964 Avanti demands a second look. By the time this car rolled off the line, Studebaker was already fighting for survival as a company, yet it somehow found the engineering will to build one of the most technically interesting performance cars of the entire era. Under that low, fiberglass-bodied shape sits a supercharged R2 289 — a genuinely rare combination even when the car was new, and one that’s become almost impossible to find in this kind of original, low-mileage condition today. The question isn’t whether this car qualifies as a muscle car. It’s why so few people still know it exists.

A Dying Automaker’s Most Ambitious Engine

By 1964, Studebaker was in serious financial trouble, having already announced it would close its South Bend, Indiana factory before the model year ended. Against that backdrop, the Avanti’s R2 package — a 289-cubic-inch V8 fitted with a Paxton supercharger — reads almost like defiance. Rather than retreating to safe, economical engineering as the company’s finances collapsed, Studebaker’s engineers built one of the most sophisticated forced-induction production engines available from any American manufacturer at the time, years before superchargers became a common muscle car option. It’s a reminder that some of the era’s most interesting engineering came from manufacturers with the least room for error.

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Why the Avanti Rarely Gets Called a Muscle Car

Part of the Avanti’s obscurity comes down to branding: it doesn’t wear a Ford, Chevy, or Mopar badge, and it doesn’t fit the long-hood, short-deck silhouette that defines the genre in most people’s minds. Raymond Loewy’s fiberglass body looks more like a personal luxury coupe than a factory hot rod, which is precisely why the supercharged R2 engine underneath catches people off guard. Once you account for the power-to-weight numbers a Paxton-blown 289 could deliver in a fiberglass-bodied coupe, though, the Avanti earns its spot in muscle car conversations just as legitimately as anything from Detroit’s big three. That distinction matters more with each passing year, as Avanti values climb among collectors specifically hunting for cars overlooked by the mainstream muscle car market.

The Brothers Collection’s Case for Preservation

This particular Avanti comes from the Brothers Collection, a group of cars regularly featured on Muscle Car of the Week specifically because of their originality and remarkably low mileage. Cars this old rarely survive in unmolested condition, especially from a manufacturer that shuttered production only a year after this one was built, which makes surviving parts and factory documentation harder to source than for mainstream muscle cars. An Avanti R2 preserved this well isn’t just a curiosity — it’s a genuine piece of automotive history from a company that didn’t get the decades of aftermarket support that kept Mopar and GM performance parts in production.

A Car From the Losing Side of Detroit’s Story

There’s something poignant about a car this well-engineered coming from a company that didn’t survive to build a second generation. While Ford, Chevy, and Chrysler spent the following decade building an entire muscle car arms race, Studebaker’s factory closed and its badge quietly disappeared from new-car showrooms. That makes surviving, well-documented Avanti R2s like this one a rare window into what Studebaker might have kept building had circumstances gone differently — a genuinely quick, supercharged American coupe that never got the chance to compete in the era it helped kick off. It’s a detail that keeps coming up whenever this particular Avanti gets discussed among Studebaker enthusiasts, precisely because so few original R2 cars have survived in this condition to compare it against.

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