Studebaker GT Hawk 1963 images

This 1963 Studebaker Gran Turismo Hawk carries a four-barrel 289 V8 and a 3-speed Flight-O-Matic automatic, but Studebaker actually offered the engine in four different states of tune that year, including a supercharged version most fans have never heard of. Built during the company’s final years of U.S. passenger car production, every surviving GT Hawk is a piece of automotive history. Here’s what made this compact grand tourer more interesting than it looks.

This is a 1963 Studebaker Hawk GT is the Sport Coupe and will seat four. The engine is a 289 CID mounted with a 4 barrel carburetor and the unit imaged here has a 3-speed Flight-O-Matic automatic transmission. There were only 625 of these roll off the assembly line in 1963.

Our thanks to Gateway Classic Cars for the images displayed here.

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Only a few Studebaker dealers in 1963 could say they had sold a factory hot rod that could out-punch cars twice its price, and most buyers who saw the fine print walked right past it. Underneath the crisp Raymond Loewy-inspired lines of this Gran Turismo Hawk sits a 289 cubic-inch small-block that Studebaker offered in no fewer than four distinct states of tune that year, from a mild two-barrel commuter setup all the way up to a supercharged monster nobody expected from South Bend. The car pictured here wears the four-barrel version, a genuine sleeper in a lineup most people associate with practical family sedans. What did Studebaker’s engineers actually squeeze out of that little V8 when they really let it loose?

Four Different Personalities Under One Hood

Studebaker offered the 289 in four distinct states of tune for 1963: a standard two-barrel version producing 210 horsepower, an optional four-barrel setup making 225 horsepower (the configuration on the car pictured here), the R1 package rated at 240 horsepower, and the wildest option of all, the McCulloch-supercharged R2, good for 289 horsepower and 370 lb-ft of torque. That spread meant a single buyer could walk into a Studebaker showroom and order anything from a comfortable long-distance cruiser to a genuine street brawler off the same basic order sheet, a level of flexibility that was nearly unheard of for a mid-size independent automaker fighting to stay relevant against Detroit’s Big Three. The four-barrel setup paired here with the 3-speed Flight-O-Matic automatic split the difference nicely, giving buyers a noticeable step up in performance without sacrificing the smoothness of an automatic transmission.

A Rare Survivor From a Shrinking Company

Studebaker built roughly 4,634 Gran Turismo Hawks across all engine variants for the 1963 model year, and the supercharged R2 cars were genuine unicorns, with only about 276 leaving the factory with that engine installed. By this point Studebaker was already in its final years of U.S. passenger car production, having decided to close its historic South Bend, Indiana plant at the end of 1963, which means every surviving GT Hawk from that model year, four-barrel or otherwise, represents a rolling piece of the company’s last real stand against Ford, GM, and Chrysler. Studebaker’s engineers clearly had not lost their ambition on the way out the door, packing four separate performance tiers into a compact grand tourer that most casual observers still associate with practical family sedans rather than genuine performance machinery.

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