History/Breakdown: 1964 Studebaker Avanti Paxton Supercharged R2

A full year or two before the GTO, Barracuda, or Mustang existed, Studebaker, a company that was already dying financially, built a supercharged, aircraft-cockpit-inspired coupe that set a genuine Bonneville land speed record for a factory-stock production car. This 1964 Avanti R2, one of the last built before Studebaker’s original run ended, comes from The Brothers Collection with remarkably low original mileage. Commenters still argue over whether it deserves the title of America’s first true muscle car. Watch and decide for yourself.

Ask most muscle car fans to name the first factory muscle car and you will get the same three answers every time: Pontiac GTO, Plymouth Barracuda, Ford Mustang. Almost nobody says Studebaker, and almost nobody is right. A full year or two before any of those nameplates existed, a dying South Bend automaker put a supercharged small-block, aircraft-style controls, and an actual land speed record into a fiberglass-bodied coupe that most car people today have never sat in, let alone driven. This particular 1964 Avanti R2 carries almost none of the mileage most 60-year-old cars have accumulated, which raises an obvious question about just how carefully it has been kept, and by whom.

Studebaker’s Last-Ditch Bet

The Avanti was Studebaker’s last real swing for relevance, a low-slung fiberglass-bodied coupe rushed into production in 1962 as the company’s finances were already collapsing under it. When Studebaker shut down its South Bend, Indiana assembly plant in December 1963, Avanti production did not end there, a small group of dealers bought the tooling and rights, forming the independent Avanti Motor Corporation to keep building the car in far smaller numbers. That makes this particular 1964 example one of the very last Avantis built under either version of the company, a genuinely rare survivor of a car that almost did not make it past its second model year. Studebaker’s own dealers effectively kept a dead brand’s most interesting product alive by hand for a few more years, a level of grassroots commitment most abandoned nameplates never get.

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A Design by One of the Greats

Design credit for the Avanti’s shape belongs in large part to Tom Kellogg, a young designer Raymond Loewy hired straight out of Art Center College of Design and put to work on what became one of the most distinctive American car silhouettes of the 1960s. One commenter who worked alongside Kellogg decades later described being shown the original design studies and sketches Kellogg had kept from that period, calling him “one of the greatest designers of our time,” a firsthand account that ties this specific car back to the design process that produced it, sixty years removed. Loewy’s design firm was already famous for streamlined locomotives and packaging work by the time Kellogg joined, and the Avanti’s shape carries that same obsession with aerodynamic honesty rather than applied chrome ornamentation.

160 MPH, Straight From the Factory Floor

Perhaps the single most remarkable claim attached to this car’s reputation involves Bonneville. Commenters recall Studebaker advertising the Avanti as the fastest stock American car on the road at the time, with a showroom-stock example reportedly averaging around 160 to 167 miles per hour across multiple runs at the Bonneville Salt Flats, setting a production-car speed record. For a company on the brink of financial collapse to put a genuinely factory-stock car into that kind of company says everything about how seriously Studebaker’s engineers took the Avanti’s performance mission, even as the rest of the business was falling apart around them. Most of Studebaker’s contemporaries were still years away from taking aerodynamics or high-speed durability testing that seriously on anything sold to the general public.

The Paxton Supercharger That Made It Possible

The “R2” in this car’s designation refers to its factory-supercharged 289-cubic-inch V8, boosted by a Paxton centrifugal supercharger bolted directly to the engine. Studebaker offered a full range of R-series performance options on the Avanti, from the naturally aspirated R1 up through the ultra-rare, race-only R3 and R4 variants, with the R2 sitting as the most common street-driven supercharged configuration buyers could actually order and drive home. It is the option that made the Avanti’s Bonneville-record reputation possible without requiring a full race-only engine build.

Cockpit Details Nobody Else Was Doing in 1963

Long before airbags or crumple zones were mandated anywhere, the Avanti shipped with an integral roll bar built into the fiberglass body itself and a row of aircraft-style toggle switches mounted above the windshield rather than a conventional dashboard layout. One commenter specifically called out the video for skipping past these details, noting the aircraft-inspired controls and roll bar as evidence of just how far ahead of its era the Avanti’s cabin design really was, safety and cockpit thinking that most of Detroit would not catch up to for another decade or more.

A Neighbor’s R-3, and a School Parking Lot Legend

One commenter’s personal story adds texture no spec sheet can. As a kid in the early 1960s, he recalled a neighbor’s R-3 Avanti, boosted further to an estimated 7 to 8 pounds of supercharger boost with a hotter aftermarket camshaft swapped in, pushing an extrapolated 400 horsepower on a local dyno. Riding along past his school as classes let out, the neighbor floored it in neutral just to let the engine roar, then dropped it back into gear and chirped the tires in front of a stunned crowd of students and teachers, the kind of story that turns a spec sheet into a memory.

Why The Brothers Collection Chose This Car

It is worth asking why a muscle car showcase reaches for a Studebaker at all, when GTOs and Chevelles are the obvious, expected picks. The answer is in the details this particular example carries: extremely low original mileage, a documented ownership history with The Brothers Collection, and a genuine claim to being the very first American factory muscle car, built by a company that had nothing left to lose and decided to build something extraordinary anyway. That is a more interesting story than most of the cars that get called muscle cars by default.

A Car That Still Divides Opinion Today

Even now, commenters split cleanly into two camps on the Avanti’s polarizing design, those who call it one of a kind and impossible not to love, and those who simply do not see the appeal. One self-described owner, turning 70 this year, put it plainly: “It’s a unique, polarizing design, people either love them or hate them.” Sixty years after Studebaker bet its remaining reputation on this shape, that split verdict is arguably the highest compliment a design this unusual could still be paying for.

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