Studebaker’s Supercharged Avanti Set 29 Bonneville Records on Pump Gas in 1962 — Two Years Before the GTO “Invented” the Muscle Car

The 1963 Studebaker Avanti R2 wrapped a Paxton-supercharged 289 making 289 horsepower in a Raymond Loewy fiberglass body, and Studebaker sold it as the world’s fastest production car. Hemmings’ Mike Musto asks whether the last new car out of South Bend was America’s first muscle car — or its most beautiful misfire.

1963 Studebaker Avanti R2 supercharged coupe

Ask most enthusiasts when the muscle car era began and they will point to the 1964 Pontiac GTO. Studebaker had already made its case two years earlier, in the fall of 1962, when it took out ads calling the new Avanti “The World’s Fastest Production Car” and backed the line with 29 United States Auto Club stock-car records set at Bonneville — on Mobil premium pump gas, in a car USAC certified as showroom stock. The Avanti did it with a 289-cubic-inch V8, a Paxton supercharger, a 550-pound fiberglass body, and the first caliper disc brakes ever fitted to an American production car. Then the company that built it shut its South Bend plant four months before the Mustang went on sale. Hemmings’ Mike Musto spends thirteen minutes with a 1963 Avanti R2 trying to answer the question that has hung over the car for six decades: was this America’s first true muscle car, or a misunderstood styling exercise from a dying independent? The evidence is more convincing than most people expect.

Mike Musto Asks the Question Studebaker Fans Have Argued for Sixty Years

The video is an episode of Hemmings’ TESTED Muscle series, and the framing in Hemmings’ own description is blunt: when you think Studebaker, do you picture a sleek mid-century design with an aircraft-inspired interior and a supercharged V8, or something frumpier? Musto’s job is to settle whether the R2 belongs in the muscle car conversation or whether it was, in Hemmings’ words, a design exercise from an automaker better known for pedestrian transportation. The car he drives is a supercharged 1963 R2, and the episode gives the Loewy shape plenty of screen time — the grille-less “bottom breather” nose, the Coke-bottle sides, the raised rear roofline, and the cockpit with its overhead switch panel and padded roll bar built into the roof structure.

Hemmings calls the R2 “arguably the world’s first grand touring, executive muscle car,” and that phrase does a lot of work. The Avanti was never a stripped-down intermediate with a big engine; it was a four-seat GT with a base price of $4,445 — about $190 more than a 1963 Corvette Sting Ray coupe. Viewers who have watched the episode tend to fixate on two things: the stance, which several describe as pure muscle even standing still, and how futuristic the shape still looks more than sixty years on. The comments also fill with childhood memories — a grandfather’s Avanti on the school run, a first sighting in a 1963 magazine — and at least one owner who reports finally buying the car after 28 years of wanting one. The video has drawn about 37,000 views since Hemmings posted it in September 2023, modest by YouTube standards but with an unusually engaged audience.

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Five Weeks in Palm Springs, 129 Pieces of Fiberglass, and a Company Out of Time

The Avanti exists because Sherwood Egbert, the former McCulloch Corporation executive who became Studebaker’s president in February 1961, needed a halo car fast. He sketched the idea himself and handed it to Raymond Loewy, whose office had shaped Studebaker’s best designs since the early 1940s. Loewy rented a house outside Palm Springs, California, hired a small team including young Art Center graduate Tom Kellogg, and worked in secret for about five weeks; the quarter-scale model was finished in eight days. Studebaker’s board approved it, and the first prototype was shown at the New York Auto Show on April 25, 1962 — a little over a year after the design session began.

Underneath, the car was a parts-bin special by necessity. The 289 V8 came from the Hawk, the frame and 109-inch wheelbase from the Lark, the transmissions from Borg-Warner, the Twin-Traction limited-slip from Dana, and the front discs from Bendix — the same Dunlop-licensed calipers used on the Jaguar E-Type. Three engines were offered: the naturally aspirated R1 at 240 horsepower, the Paxton-supercharged R2 at 289 horsepower, and the Andy Granatelli-developed R3 at 335 horsepower. Granatelli, who ran Paxton at the time, was the man behind the Bonneville program: the R3 Avanti’s two-way flying mile was 168.15 mph, it reached 178.5 mph on one leg of the 20-mile run, and it beat the previous American Class C record by more than 50 mph. A year later he returned with an experimental twin-supercharged car and ran 196 mph. Road & Track later timed an R2 from 0 to 60 in 7.3 seconds, a few tenths quicker than a Hi-Po 289 Mustang.

What killed the car was not the market but the body. Molded Fiberglass Products of Ohio, which also built Corvette shells, delivered 129-piece Avanti bodies that would not fit together, and Studebaker’s planned 1,000 cars a month became a trickle while deposit-holders waited and then canceled. Only 3,834 Avantis shipped in 1963. On December 9, 1963, Studebaker announced the closing of its South Bend plant, and the last Avanti left the line on New Year’s Eve. Total production over an 18-month run was 4,643 cars, of which 1,833 were supercharged R2s — 1,552 for 1963 and 281 for 1964. Just nine left the factory with the R3 engine.

What the R2 Gets Right — and What a Buyer Should Know

The case for the Avanti as a muscle car rests on the formula it beat everyone to: a V8 with forced induction, a long-hood, short-deck two-door with bucket seats, and a factory speed program to sell it. The case against is price and weight — at 3,500 pounds and around $5,000 well-equipped, it cost roughly $1,000 more than a loaded V8 Mustang would a year and a half later, and it was aimed at executives rather than teenagers. Driven today, a healthy R2 behaves like a period GT until about 3,500 rpm, when the Paxton comes on with a distinct whine and the car pulls hard toward its roughly 120 mph top speed. The factory free-flow mufflers were loud enough to be illegal in California at the time.

For anyone shopping, two things matter more than the horsepower number. First, know which Avanti you are looking at: the Studebaker-built 1963-64 cars are the only ones with the South Bend 289, while the Avanti II that dealers Nathan Altman and Leo Newman relaunched in 1965 used Chevrolet small-blocks and continued in various hands for four more decades, adding roughly 4,100 cars that are a different collectible entirely. Second, original supercharged cars were used hard, modified often, and ignored by collectors for so long that unmolested R2s are scarce — which is exactly why they are finally being taken seriously, with a 1963 supercharged Avanti taking the top American Production Class award at Amelia Island in 2014. Check for fiberglass repairs at the panel seams, confirm the Paxton and its drive are correct, and expect the Lark-derived chassis to be the least of your worries. Whether or not you call it a muscle car, the Avanti is the rare 1960s American performance car that can still stop a room full of people who have never heard of it.

Watch the full video above and let us know your thoughts in the comments.