Studebaker Avanti 1964 Paxton Supercharged R2

This 1964 Studebaker Avanti R2 wears a factory Paxton supercharger and one of the rarest production tallies in American car history — just 809 Avantis were built that model year before Studebaker’s South Bend factory shut down for good. Andy Granatelli’s supercharger turned Raymond Loewy’s already-striking design into a genuine performer. Here is what makes this unique car worth a much closer look.

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.

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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, with just 809 total Avantis of any configuration built that year 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.

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.

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