Studebaker Avanti 1964 Paxton Supercharged R2

Only 281 examples of this supercharged 1964 Studebaker Avanti R2 were built before the South Bend factory shut its doors for good, making it one of the rarest slices of an already tiny production run. Raymond Loewy’s radical fiberglass body hid a genuine Paxton supercharger putting real power behind its aircraft-inspired styling. Read on to find out how a dying company built one of its most memorable performance cars right at the very end.

Only 809 Avantis wore a 1964 model year tag, and this Paxton-supercharged R2 is one of the rarest slices of that already tiny number. Studebaker’s South Bend factory had already shut its doors in December 1963 when these final cars trickled out, built from leftover parts by a company that knew its own days as a full-line automaker were numbered. Raymond Loewy’s fiberglass body still looked like nothing else on the road, but it’s what Andy Granatelli’s Paxton supercharger did to the engine bay that turned this unique car into something closer to a giant-killer. How does a dying company end up building one of its most memorable performance cars right at the very end?

A Supercharger Built by a Racing Legend

The R2 designation on this Avanti isn’t just a trim badge — it means Studebaker bolted a Paxton SN-60 centrifugal supercharger onto the 289-cubic-inch V8, pushing output to roughly 290 horsepower. That supercharger program came courtesy of Andy Granatelli’s Paxton Products, and it turned what was already a striking, Loewy-designed grand tourer into a legitimate performance machine that could hang with contemporary V8 rivals wearing far bigger displacement numbers. It’s the kind of factory forced-induction setup that still turns heads at a car show today, decades before superchargers became a common bolt-on for anything short of a dedicated race car.

⚑ Featured Gear

Start Car Conversations →

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Built in the Shadow of a Factory Shutdown

Across the entire Studebaker run, only 1,833 supercharged R2 Avantis were built between the 1963 and 1964 model years combined — and the 1964 cars are the rarer half of that split by a wide margin, with just 281 of that year’s 809 total Avantis wearing the supercharged R2 badge before South Bend production ended for good. Buying an Avanti in 1964 meant buying a car built by a company already living on borrowed time, which makes every surviving example a small monument to a design team that refused to phone it in right up until the end.

The Man Behind the Body

Raymond Loewy, already famous for industrial design work ranging from the Lucky Strike pack to Air Force One’s livery, led the small team that sketched the Avanti’s fiberglass body in a rented house in Palm Springs under intense time pressure, trying to give Studebaker one last shot at reinventing its image. The result — a low, coke-bottle-shaped grand tourer with no traditional grille and a dashboard borrowed more from an aircraft cockpit than a 1960s sedan — looked like nothing else General Motors, Ford, or Chrysler was building at the time, and it still doesn’t look quite like anything else on the road today.

R1 vs. R2 — Not All Avantis Were Equal

Studebaker offered the Avanti with two distinct engine states of tune: the naturally aspirated R1, making around 240 horsepower, and the supercharged R2 featured here, which pushed that same 289-cubic-inch small block to roughly 290 horsepower through the Paxton blower. A handful of even more exotic R3 and R4 variants existed on paper or in tiny numbers, but the R2 represented the realistic performance ceiling most buyers could actually order and drive home. That gap between R1 and R2 output is exactly why supercharged cars carry a meaningful premium among Avanti collectors today, since it’s a genuine factory performance step rather than a trim-level badge difference.

What a Genuine R2 Commands Today

Studebaker’s total collapse as an automaker not long after the Avanti’s debut has actually helped the car’s collector standing rather than hurt it, since the Avanti is permanently frozen as the final statement of a company that no longer exists in any form. Documented, numbers-matching R2 cars — especially rare 1964 examples built after the factory itself had already closed — routinely command a real premium over the more common R1 cars at auction, reflecting both the mechanical rarity and the poignant history of being built in a factory’s final days. That combination of scarcity and story is a big part of why Avantis have quietly become one of the more collectible independent-manufacturer cars of the entire era.

Living With an Avanti Today

Owning any Avanti means accepting a car built in genuinely chaotic circumstances, with fiberglass body panels that can vary slightly from car to car and a parts supply chain that dried up the moment Studebaker closed its doors. A dedicated owners’ community and a handful of specialists have kept reproduction panels, correct trim, and rebuilt Paxton superchargers available for R2 owners specifically, which has made keeping one of these cars on the road considerably more realistic today than it would have seemed a few decades ago. It’s a car that rewards owners willing to seek out a small, knowledgeable community rather than a mainstream restoration shop, one built as much around shared parts sources and technical know-how as around any single dealership network.

Rivals It Never Quite Had

The Avanti didn’t really compete against a direct equivalent — Chevrolet’s Corvette and Ford’s Thunderbird occupied similar personal-luxury and grand-touring space, but neither rival came from a company on the verge of leaving the car business entirely, and neither wore a factory supercharger option as standard equipment on its top model. That lack of a true rival is part of what makes the Avanti hard to categorize even today: too fast and too radically styled to be dismissed as a curiosity, but too rare and too tied to Studebaker’s collapse to ever become a mainstream collector staple the way the Corvette did.

Why the Avanti Still Commands Respect

It would have been easy for Studebaker to let quality slide as the company wound down, but the Avanti’s blend of aircraft-inspired styling and genuine supercharged performance still holds up against cars built by companies that stuck around for decades longer. A numbers-matching R2 like this one isn’t just a unique car — it’s a snapshot of the last gasp of American independent automaking, wearing a supercharger that most of Detroit’s Big Three wouldn’t catch up to for years, and a reminder of just how much engineering ambition survived right up to a company’s final days on the assembly line.

Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Republished by Blog Post Promoter