NOTE: this is one of my favorite modern cars. Probably because I can fit in it.
As it
rolled into the LeMay America’s Car Museum in 2001, the Avanti didn’t run, was
painted metalflake green, and looked like it’d gone 10 rounds with Tyson. Renee
Crist, the collections manager at the museum, said she probably could have made
the argument to keep it green and refurbish or even preserve it, but that
approach wouldn’t have done the car justice – it was the first production
Studebaker Avanti, after all, and it deserved a full restoration, which is now
entering its final stages. “It sparkled like a hot tub,” Renee said. “It was
truly a piece of art, and we were really trying to find out why it was painted
the way it was – was it for an art gallery, was it for some kind of show?”
Investigating the car’s history produced plenty of dead ends. A Tacoma,
Washington, collector had donated it and another Avanti – the latter claimed to
be the last Studebaker-built Avanti – both in dilapidated condition, to the
museum after realizing he would never get around to restoring them. While the
other Avanti ultimately proved to be a late-production example, but not the
very last, the green metalflake-painted Avanti indeed was serial number 1001
and still had its original engine (engine number 1002) and original seats to
boot.
According
to Studebaker Avanti historians, that meant that it was one of the first 10
production Avantis assigned with a so-called “born-on date” of April 26, 1962,
the day that Studebaker introduced the fiberglass-bodied coupe to the public
simultaneously in New York City and in South Bend. “They’re kind of like
racehorses, which are all assigned a birthdate of January 1, regardless of when
they were born,” said Dave Kinney, who recently made national news for
commissioning the restoration of the second production Avanti, serial number
1002, which went on to win its class at this year’s Amelia Island Concours
d’Elegance. “Studebaker obviously didn’t build all 10 of those Avantis in one
day, and some people say they were built many months before then.” John Hull,
author of Avanti: The Complete Story, said that all Avantis were essentially
handbuilt cars – prototype, pre-production, and production alike – so there
wasn’t an assembly line as we typically think of it. Instead, the earliest
production Avantis were probably built in batches of three or four at a time in
South Bend, much like how Nate Altman’s Avanti Motor Company built the first
Avanti IIs. What Hull did discover was that in June of 1962 Studebaker
designated the first five or six Avantis – all painted white and fitted with
deluxe orange interiors – to the company’s regional technical training centers
for use in developing shop manuals and in training the company’s mechanics on
how to service the cars. Serial number 1001 – built with an R2 supercharged
289-cu.in. V-8, four-speed manual transmission, and Twin-Traction limited-slip
differential – went to the South Bend training center, while the others went to
training centers in New York, Atlanta, Kansas City, and San Francisco. What
happened to 1001 after its time at the South Bend training center is anybody’s
guess, but by January 1970 it had made its way to Boston, racked up nearly
40,000 miles, and become separated from its Paxton supercharger. It then
bounced around New York and New Jersey until the collector who donated the
Avanti to the museum bought it and took it out West. When he gave it to the
museum, its odometer displayed almost 69,000 miles
Renee
Crist said that while the museum does have modified vehicles in its collection
and uses them to show the trends of specific eras, she and the museum’s
directors decided that “it was much more important to tell the story of the
Avanti,” of Raymond Loewy, and of what Studebaker was trying to do with the car
than to have to explain why the car had been painted green. So in 2011, she –
along with Studebaker collector James Bell – took on the role of project
manager for the restoration of 1001 and began raising the funds to pay for a
full mechanical restoration. Enough donations came in, both monetary and in the
form of parts and promised labor (Renee has estimated the total so far at
around $50,000 and growing), to allow the museum to begin the Avanti’s
restoration in October 2011. Despite the fact that the Avanti had been used as
a daily driver in the Northeast, she said that it had surprisingly little rust
underneath. “We had to replace one crossmember on the frame, but the hog
troughs were solid,” she said. Of more concern was some damage to the left
front corner that had at one point been poorly fixed and that would need to be
addressed. And then the museum staff had to sort out the actual damage to the
car from the infamous poor build quality of the early Avantis. As both Kinney
and Hull related, Studebaker initially contracted with the Molded Fiberglass
Company of Ashtabula, Ohio – the same company that had supplied Chevrolet with
fiberglass parts for the early Corvette bodies – to build complete bodies for
the Avanti, but kept running into production issues. “MFC built parts, but they
weren’t really an assembler,” Hull said. “Avantis had about 110 fiberglass
parts to put together, so they were like a giant jigsaw puzzle, so parts
wouldn’t line up, the back windows wouldn’t fit, and the doors wouldn’t seal.”
The poor build quality eventually led Studebaker to bring Avanti body
production in-house.
Renee
said the museum decided to restore the Avanti back to the way it was when it
left the showroom, relying on Ron Hochhalter at Advanced Collision Repair in
Sunnyside, Washington, to repair the damaged bodywork and to strip off the bass
boat green paint before repainting it in Avanti White. Restoration has
progressed since then, as documented on the
LeMay’s website: The original (and once again supercharged) R2
engine has been rebuilt, body and paint work is now done as is the chrome, and
the car is currently at the upholstery shop.
While
Renee said she anticipates the Avanti’s restoration – the museum’s first
complete restoration – wrapping up this fall, she said she’s still trying to
track down some important parts to complete the restoration, including the
Avanti-specific tuxedo orange and black carpet, a pair of glass headlamp lenses
in good condition and a windshield in good shape.
“Once
it’s done, it’ll be one of our crown jewels here,” she said. “It’ll be one of
our star cars.”
Kinney even said he’d like
to show it together with his 1002 and possibly even a few of the other early
Avantis, most of which are still around. “I’m really excited for the museum,”
he said. “I think we’re about to see a renaissance with these cars.”
photo credit: © 2014 LeMay Museum
text credit: © 2014 Daniel Strohl via hemmings.com
