Lark and Super Lark: The Last Days of Studebaker

By 1963, Studebaker was already doomed, but its dynamic president, Sherwood Egbert, was not yet ready to admit defeat. Not only did he launch the sporty Avanti, he hired Andy Granatelli to develop a series of hot engines that transformed the humble compact Studebaker Lark into a ferocious — and unlikely — performance car. This is the story of the Lark and Super Lark.

1963 Studebaker Super Lark Lark badge

FALSE DAWN

Studebaker has a venerable history: The Studebaker brothers of South Bend, Indiana, began manufacturing wagons in 1852 and the Studebaker Brothers Manufacturing Company sold its first cars in 1902. In 1910, the company bought out Detroit automaker Everitt-Metzger-Flanders (E-M-F), reorganizing the following year as the Studebaker Corporation. Although Studebaker was now firmly in the automobile business, they still produced horse-drawn wagons until after World War I.

Like most automakers, Studebaker fell on hard times during the Great Depression, leading to bankruptcy in 1933 and the suicide of president Albert Erskine. Erskine’s lieutenants Paul Hoffman and Harold Vance managed to revive the company by the late thirties, thanks in large part to the very successful 1939 Studebaker Champion.

1947 Studebaker Starlight side
Virgil Exner Sr. developed the 1947 Studebaker while working for Raymond Loewy, then a Studebaker consultant. He presented the design to the client without Loewy’s approval. When Loewy found out, he immediately fired Exner, who promptly went to work for Studebaker directly. The Starlight models, with their unique wraparound backlight, inspired many jokes, but they were very popular. (Photo: “47 Studebaker Starlight Coupe” © 2007 Richard Lawry; used with permission)

Studebaker was, as its advertising proclaimed, the first to introduce an all-new postwar car: the 1947 “coming or going” models, designed by Virgil Exner. Under the leadership of Harold Vance, the company had its best-ever sales years in 1949–1950 and did well in the early fifties. Between 1947 and 1953, Vance managed to double Studebaker’s gross sales and earn profits totaling $108 million. Studebaker had a modern V8 engine and automatic transmission in 1951 and in 1953 unveiled the beautiful Starlight and Starliner coupes, styled by the design firm of Raymond Loewy.

Even then, dark clouds were settling in. Studebaker remained undercapitalized and its South Bend factory had been obsolescent even before the war. The company had avoided most of the strikes that had often paralyzed other automakers, but its labor costs per car were significantly higher than any rival’s. Studebaker cars were not exactly over-engineered, but the company spent some 25% more to build each car than it would have cost Chevrolet.

With its higher costs, Studebaker was particularly vulnerable to the vicious price war between Ford and Chevrolet between 1953 and 1956. Determined to claim the No. 1 slot in overall sales, Ford and Chevrolet each stepped up production, which led dealers to slash prices — and margins — to the bone just to move the metal. Since Studebaker’s margins were already slimmer than Chevrolet’s or Ford’s, Studebaker could not afford to keep up and its sales plummeted. By early 1953, Studebaker was losing $2.5 million a month.

THE PACKARD MERGER

Luxury automaker Packard was also on the skids in the early fifties. The price war had affected Packard almost as badly as it had Studebaker and Hudson and its old rival Cadillac had eclipsed it in sales and prestige. While it had previously been the most elite of American automakers, by 1953, Packard was looking old-fashioned.

Packard management felt that what the company needed was volume. Since the advent of the One-Twenty in 1935, Packard had moved into the near-luxury class then dominated by Buick, but at the cost of much of its former prestige, something new Packard president James Nance was eager to rectify.

Although Studebaker had higher volume, a bigger dealer network, and a lower price point than Packard did, the South Bend firm was not Nance’s first choice. Nance’s preferred partner was Kenosha, Wisconsin’s Nash Motors, whose president, George W. Mason, been proposing a merger of the independents since 1946. Nance’s predecessor, Hugh Ferry, had begun negotiations with Mason to create such an alliance, which they hoped would eventually include Packard, Nash, Studebaker, and Hudson.

In January 1954, Nash and Hudson agreed to merge, reforming as the American Motors Corporation in May. For a time, it seemed that Packard might join them, but its board was wary of AMC, recognizing that the new company would end the year deep in the red. In February, the Packard board refused to even hear George Mason’s merger proposal, opting instead to pursue a merger with Studebaker, independent of AMC.

By September, the Packard and Studebaker boards had approved the formation of a new Studebaker-Packard corporation effective October 1. Jim Nance became president of the merged company, with former Studebaker president Paul Hoffman becoming chairman of the new board of directors. Nine days later, George Mason died, leaving his vice president, George Romney, as the president of AMC. Romney and Nance were both relatively young and very ambitious and it quickly became clear that they could not coexist happily. By mid-October, Romney was telling the press that there would be no Studebaker-Packard/AMC merger.

The Studebaker-Packard marriage almost immediately turned sour. In their eagerness, Packard had not requested an independent audit of Studebaker’s books, which proved to be a grievous mistake. Shortly after the merger, Packard finance VP Walter Grant determined that Studebaker’s financial position was far more precarious than they had assumed. Grant estimated Studebaker’s break-even production level not at 165,000 units, as the company’s proxy statement had asserted, but 282,000, a level Studebaker had only reached at its 1950 peak. Studebaker production fell well short of even the lower figure for 1954.

That distressing revelation might have given Packard grounds to dissolve the deal (and perhaps to pursue civil action), but by that point, Packard’s own financial situation was precarious, and the Packard board believed that the partnership with Studebaker was their only hope for survival. They decided to stay the course.

Even with substantial combined tax credits, Studebaker-Packard lost $26 million for 1954. Nance and Hoffman initiated a painful cost-cutting program, which included the termination of Raymond Loewy’s consulting agreement and the hiring of Lincoln-Mercury designer Bill Schmidt as VP of styling and Ford designer Duncan McRae as Studebaker chief stylist. Nance and Hoffman also negotiated a new UAW contract, the bitter negotiations for which led to Studebaker’s first really protracted strike. All these moves failed to stem Studebaker-Packard’s losses, which totaled $29.7 million for 1955.

CURTISS-WRIGHT

Nance had high hopes for an all-new body planned for the 1957 model year, which was to be shared by both Studebakers and Packards. Unfortunately, the company didn’t have the $50 million needed for tooling and the corporation’s principal backers refused to extend the necessary credit. Two different management consulting firms looked at the Studebaker-Packard’s financial situation and recommended liquidation.

Increasingly desperate, Nance turned to the aviation company Curtiss-Wright, which was then earning formidable profits from its defense contracts. Curtiss-Wright chairman Roy Hurley (a former Ford manufacturing executive) was not interested in a merger, but floated the idea of a management agreement. Hurley offered Studebaker-Packard $10 million for Studebaker’s remaining defense contracts and $25 million for a prepaid rental of company facilities in Michigan and Indiana as well as a three-year agreement for him to manage Studebaker-Packard’s business. In exchange, Curtiss-Wright would receive options to purchase 45% of Studebaker-Packard’s stock for around $40 million less than market value.

It was not a particularly attractive deal for Studebaker-Packard, but Nance had no choice. The company’s 1956 losses ultimately totaled $102.3 million and Studebaker-Packard was losing 40 to 50 dealer franchises a month. With Hurley’s help, Nance had to tap the last $15.3 million of Packard’s revolving credit lines just to keep the doors open during the negotiations. The Studebaker-Packard board signed the deal in July 1956.

Nance resigned as soon as the deal was signed, joining Ford Motor Company that fall; Paul Hoffman also departed. Hurley named chief engineer Harold Churchill as president with Eugene Hardig taking Churchill’s place as engineering chief.

Packard’s fate was sealed as soon as Nance departed. In retrospect, it probably would have been the easier of the two brands to salvage, but Hurley and the board were counting on Studebaker’s ostensibly greater volume, and Packard had lost its engine and transmission plant in the Curtiss-Wright deal. Packard endured two final, ignominious model years as an over-decorated Studebaker and then disappeared for good.

1958 Packard Hawk front 3q
The Packard Hawk was a rehash of the Studebaker Golden Hawk, inspired — if we may call it that — by the contemporary Maserati 3500 GT. Duncan McRae originally designed this car as a one-off for Curtiss-Wright president Roy Hurley, but it was eventually pressed into service as a Packard. Fewer than 600 were sold before the curtain came down. Interestingly, the Hawk also had a McCulloch-supercharged Studebaker 289 (4,737 cc) engine. With a two-barrel Stromberg carburetor and slightly less boost than the later R2 (5 psi/0.34 bar), it was rated at 275 hp (205 kW).

Studebaker’s volume, meanwhile, was sinking rapidly. Its 1958 sales were less than 60,000 units and Studebaker-Packard lost $24.5 million in 1957-58. Studebaker’s major problem, aside from an understandable shortage of public confidence, was that all designers Duncan McRae and Vince Gardner could afford were increasingly desperate rehashes of the 1953 body shell. It was no longer selling, but Studebaker-Packard could not afford to replace it.

The only upside during this period was that Studebaker-Packard negotiated a deal to become the new U.S. distributor for Mercedes-Benz, succeeding Max Hoffman’s Hoffman Motors in the spring of 1957. There was little financial benefit, since Studebaker-Packard had no real idea how to sell Mercedes cars, but it would prove fortuitous.

THE STUDEBAKER LARK

In 1957, AMC chairman George Romney abandoned the Nash and Hudson brands in favor of the compact Rambler. That fall, with the country slipping into recession, sales of the 1958 Ramblers picked up sharply even as most other car lines took a bath. The market was suddenly shifting toward compacts and economy cars.

Many of Studebaker’s 1957–58 sales were of a stripped-down base model called Scotsman, so Harold Churchill concluded that the new interest in economy cars might represent a viable direction for Studebaker. Using scrap material, Gene Hardig quickly slapped together a crude prototype of a compact sedan — essentially a 1953 Champion body shorn of more than two feet (70 cm) of front and rear overhang. The wheelbase was trimmed to 108.5 inches (2,756 mm), transforming a nominally full-size car into a compact. To complete the picture, Hardig added a wraparound windshield from the 1955 models and various interior pieces from 1956–57 Studebakers. It was an improvisation, but a clever one, producible at very low cost.

Churchill persuaded the board to approve this new compact for the 1959 model year. It was a big gamble: Other than the Studebaker Hawk coupe (itself a derivative of the 1953 Starlight coupe), the move meant the company would no longer have any full-size models. Still, Studebaker had little to lose and a similar strategy seemed to be working for AMC.

Duncan McRae’s team hastily created a pair of clay models developed by Bill Bonner and Bob Doehler. The design ultimately chosen was Bonner’s, which got some additional styling input from Virgil Exner, Jr., son of the designer of the 1947 Studebaker Starlight. The new compact’s careful agglomeration of existing parts was set off by a new front end with a simple upright grille. Historians typically call it Mercedes-like, but Exner says it was more influenced by his father’s Chrysler show cars of the mid-fifties and Chevrolet’s not-yet-released Corvair, of which the stylists were already aware. The need to keep costs low limited the compact to a very modest level of trim, which made it refreshingly understated by contemporary American standards.

Mechanically, the compact, which the company dubbed the Studebaker Lark, was all too familiar, although Hardig managed to make the shortened Champion frame both stiffer and lighter than before. The standard engine was a heavily revised, 170 cu. in. (2,780 cc) version of Studebaker’s familiar flathead six with 90 hp (67 kW). A 259 cu. in. (4,247 cc) version of the corporate V8 was optional, offering up to 195 gross horsepower (146 kW). The Lark’s handling was nothing special even for the time, but the stubby little car had adequate power and reasonable fuel economy.

1959 Studebaker Lark VI front 3q
A first-year Studebaker Lark hardtop powered by the basic Skybolt Six. A de-stroked version of the six used on Studebakers since 1955, it displaced 170 cu. in. (2,780 cc) and made 90 gross horsepower (67 kW). This car is an oddity: It’s the upscale Regal trim series, but other than automatic transmission, it has minimal equipment, lacking even windshield washers.

The Studebaker Lark was ready in only seven months, going on sale in November 1958 as a 1959 model. Like the original Champion of 20 years earlier, it proved to be the right car at the right time. The press was underwhelmed, but buyers responded with enthusiasm, quickly placing some 30,000 initial orders. Everyone knew that the Big Three were preparing compact cars, but those were still at least a year away. In the meantime, Studebaker and Rambler were in the catbird seat.

Thanks to the Lark, Studebaker’s 1959 volume swelled to 160,826 cars and 10,909 trucks, allowing the company to break even for the first time since the merger. Studebaker-Packard made a profit of $28.5 million that year. With the tax credits accumulated from the previous years’ losses, S-P’s after-tax net profits were the highest in Studebaker history.

Better still, Studebaker-Packard was now free of Curtiss-Wright, thanks in large part to Daimler-Benz. Daimler management was not thrilled with Studebaker-Packard’s efforts to market Mercedes, but they mistrusted Hurley and concluded that Curtiss-Wright’s continued involvement was not in their long-term interests. In August 1958, Daimler-Benz and Studebaker-Packard persuaded Curtiss-Wright to end its management agreement a year early and relinquish its unexercised stock options. The Studebaker-Packard board also managed to refinance the company’s long-term debt.

Back in the black, free of Hurley’s management, and with nearly 1,000 new dealers, the company’s fortunes looked brighter for 1960.

DIVERSIFICATION

It was obvious to any informed observer that the Studebaker Lark was at best a stopgap, a temporary reprieve. The designers, in particular, were aware that the Big Three were about to arrive in the compact sector in force. Duncan McRae pushed strongly to invest the profits from the Lark into an all-new body. When Churchill equivocated, McRae immediately resigned. Churchill eventually authorized development of two new compacts modeled loosely on the Rambler and Rambler American, but this did not suit the Studebaker-Packard board members, many of whom were coming to the conclusion that the automobile business was a losing proposition.

In 1960, faced with new competition from the Chevrolet Corvair, Ford Falcon, and Valiant, Lark sales fell slightly despite new convertible and station wagon models. Studebaker’s total sales, including trucks, dropped to 133,984. (Some cars and trucks, including the Lark, were also produced in CKD kit form for local assembly overseas, at plants in Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, Belgium, South Africa, the Philippines, and Israel, in the former Kaiser-Frazer plant in Haifa.) The company still turned a profit, but it was a meager $708,850.

1963 Studebaker Super Lark front
Brooks Stevens redesigned the Studebaker Lark in 1962 on a shoestring budget, adding dual headlights and a Mercedes-inspired grille. The 1963 models got a new grille and the previous wraparound windshield was deleted. You could order either a 259 cu. in. (4,247 cc) or 289 cu. in. (4,737 cc) V8, but buyers preferred the 170 cu. in. (2,780 cc) Skybolt Six with 112 hp (84 kW). Transmission choices were three-speed stick (with or without overdrive), a Borg-Warner three-speed automatic, or a four-speed manual, added in 1962.

Churchill wanted to stay in the car business, but the board decided to use the 1959–60 profits to diversify, buying a range of companies like the Gravely lawnmower company and an engine-treatment manufacturer called Chemical Compounds, which made the STP engine treatment. The board ousted Churchill in the fall of 1960 and hired Sherwood Egbert from the McCulloch Corporation to replace him. The new compact-car programs were canceled even though the company had already spent more than $4 million on them.

The diversification proved to be a sensible business decision. Although Studebaker sales fell to 92,434 for 1961, profits from the corporation’s non-automotive subsidiaries put them $2.5 million in the black.

1963 Studebaker Super Lark dash
The Studebaker Lark’s Super Lark package included a 6,000-rpm tachometer; the Lark also has full gauges rather than warning lights. Two-tone vinyl upholstery was part of the Custom trim line, although this car has the optional bucket seats and the Borg-Warner T-10 four-speed, a $189 option.

1963 Studebaker Super Lark glove box
An interesting Studebaker accessory was this nifty drop-down glovebox tray with cupholders and a pop-up vanity mirror. This was standard on all 1963 Studebaker Larks except the base-model Standard. Another option, which this car does not have, was the “Skytop” canvas sunroof, an unusual feature for an American car of this era (albeit quite common on British cars).

THE EGBERT INITIATIVE

Sherwood Egbert is often described as a sort of industrial version of John F. Kennedy: young, tall, and handsome, a charismatic ex-Marine who had already had an impressive career as executive vice president of the McCulloch Corporation. Egbert knew little about cars, but as soon as he became president of Studebaker-Packard in January 1961, he threw himself into the business with relish.

If the board had expected Egbert to prepare the Studebaker division for a quiet euthanasia, they were sorely mistaken. Egbert’s ignorance of the automotive business gave him a naïve confidence that he could turn the flagging automaker around. His first move was to hire industrial designer Brooks Stevens, with whom he’d worked at McCulloch, to restyle the 1962 Lark and Hawk on a minuscule budget of $7 million. Stevens, taking it as a challenge, came up with an adroit facelift in only six months. Studebaker Lark sales increased by nearly 30,000 units.

Among Stevens’ clever ideas was shifting the four-door Lark sedans to the longer 113-inch (2,870mm) wheelbase previously used only by the station wagons, leaving the two-door models on a slightly longer 109-inch (2,769mm) wheelbase. (GM would later adopt this split-wheelbase strategy for its A-body intermediates.) A new sporty Daytona model, Studebaker’s answer to the popular Corvair Monza and Falcon Futura, joined the Lark line-up that year, as did a plush four-door Cruiser.

1963 Studebaker Super Lark side
The original Studebaker Lark was only 175 inches (4,445 mm) long, actually a few inches shorter than a Rambler American. The 1963 two-doors were 184 inches (4,674 mm) on a 109-inch (2,769mm) wheelbase; four-doors were 4 inches (102 mm) longer in both dimensions. Larks were available in Standard, Regal, Custom, Daytona, and Cruiser models in 1963. A two-door Lark Custom Eight like this one had a base price of $2,315. Equipped like this one, the Lark weighed about 3,250 lb (1,474 kg) and cost over $3,500, a lot of money for a compact in 1963.

Egbert may not have known much about cars, but he liked sports cars — in fact, he owned a gullwing Mercedes 300SL coupe. He decided that the best way to perk up Studebaker’s image was to launch a new high-performance flagship. He hired Raymond Loewy to design one, which emerged as the fiberglass-bodied Studebaker Avanti.

Egbert knew that sporty looks alone would not make the Avanti a sports car; it needed a new image. To solve that problem, Egbert called another contact from his days at McCulloch: Andy Granatelli of Paxton Products, builders of the most popular automotive supercharger of the era.

THE MCCULLOCH SUPERCHARGER

Supercharging is one of the simplest ways to get more power out of an existing engine. Automotive superchargers had been used at least as far back as 1902, although their popularity with manufacturers had waxed and waned. However, they had been popular with the aftermarket since at least the early 1930s.

Back in 1937, Francis Colburn, an engineer at Robert Paxton McCulloch’s McCulloch Engineering Company, developed a belt-driven centrifugal supercharger for Ford flathead V8s. Although it was moderately popular, selling around 5,000 units, reliability problems led McCulloch to discontinue the street version in 1940, although during the war, the company continued to manufacture superchargers for submarine air circulation systems and other military applications.

Bob McCulloch sold his company to Borg-Warner in 1943, but after the war, he established a new McCulloch Motors Corporation, based in Los Angeles. McCulloch Motors was not a primarily an automotive company — its primary business was in small engines for lawnmowers, chainsaws, generators, and the like — but McCulloch continued to develop the automotive supercharger, setting up a new Paxton Engineering division to work on that and other experimental projects. (Among other things, McCulloch was a consultant on Henry Kaiser’s early plans for a compact car.)

In the late forties, Paxton engineer John Oehrli developed a new centrifugal supercharger with an unique ball bearing drive system: a set of hardened steel ball bearings that allowed the output shaft — which operated the compressor — to turn 4.4 times faster than the input shaft, which was driven by a belt from the engine. In 1953, McCulloch began offering this supercharger, known as the VS57, as an aftermarket accessory for Ford V8s and later a wide range of other engines.

McCulloch was interested in bigger things, so the McCulloch VS57 supercharger got a big push that fall at the International Motorama (not the traveling GM show, but a hot rod exhibition sponsored by publisher Robert Petersen), followed in January by a presentation to the Society of American Engineers (SAE) in Detroit. Later that month, Kaiser announced that it would offer the supercharger as factory equipment on its full-size cars. McCulloch went so far as to arrange an hour-long television special about the supercharger on a local L.A. station — partly narrated by Sherwood Egbert, then McCulloch’s vice president. McCulloch subsequently launched the Paxton Products division to market automotive superchargers.

One of Paxton’s earliest customers was none other than Studebaker-Packard, which bought 15,000 superchargers for use in its 1957 models. Paxton-supercharged versions of Studebaker’s 289 cu. in. (4,737 cc) V8 replaced the now-defunct Packard V8 in the new Studebaker-based 1957 Packard sedans and the Packard Hawk and Studebaker Golden Hawk coupes. (Ford also purchased a small number of Paxton-McCulloch VR57 variable-ratio superchargers for NASCAR homologation, which were installed in a few hundred “F-code” Thunderbirds and other Ford models.)

Unfortunately, the VS57’s reliability was not as impressive as its performance, due in part to quality-control problems with the ball bearing drive system and also to the fact that the blower required more maintenance than most owners bothered to give it. Those problems soon soured Detroit on factory supercharging, although the VS57 remained a popular aftermarket item. It also saw a fair amount of racing use, although NASCAR banned supercharging in April 1957.

1963 Studebaker Super Lark Avanti-badge
The Studebaker Super Lark’s R2 engine was developed for the Avanti, as the badges on the fenders indicate. R1 cars say “Avanti Powered” instead.

In 1957, racing impresario and hot-rodder Anthony (Andy) Granatelli and his brothers moved from Chicago to Los Angeles and began working with Paxton chief engineer John Thompson to resolve the McCulloch supercharger’s reliability problems. By then, the company was losing faith with the Paxton division, which had lost more than $400,000 in 1957, due mostly to high warranty costs. Granatelli bought the division from McCulloch in June 1958 and he and his brothers Joe and Vince helped to develop a new series of improved SN (“Short Nose”) superchargers, which again became popular with amateur and professional racers.

JET THRUST

Sherwood Egbert had worked with Andy Granatelli at McCulloch and had been impressed with Granatelli’s engineering acumen and business savvy. In March 1962, Egbert arranged for Studebaker to buy Paxton Products and with it the services of the Granatelli brothers. Egbert called Granatelli very early the morning after the deal was signed and began laying out his ambitious goals for Studebaker performance. Granatelli and Hardig immediately got to work hot-rodding the Studebaker V8 for the Avanti, using every trick in Granatelli’s voluminous book.

Studebaker’s V8, introduced back in 1951, was heavy by contemporary standards and had a reputation for excessive oil consumption, but it was a sturdy and generally reliable engine. Hardig had already developed a hotter R1 version (later advertised as “R1 Jet Thrust”) with 10.25:1 compression and various changes to its oiling system, ignition, timing gear, and breathing. This was somewhat more powerful than the regular 289 “Powerpak” engine already optional on the Studebaker Lark, which made 225 gross horsepower (168 kW). There was also the R2 (advertised as “R2 Super Jet Thrust”), which had different heads with 9.0:1 compression and a Paxton SN-60 supercharger making up to 6 pounds (0.41 bars) of boost.

Hardig and Granatelli subsequently developed R3, R4, and R5 versions, which were assembled mostly by hand in the Granatelli brothers’ Los Angeles workshop. Each used specially selected blocks, carefully bored out to 304.5 cu. in. (4,990 cc). The R3 was supercharged like the R2, but had a new aluminum intake manifold with no heat riser, low-restriction exhaust headers, 9.75:1 compression, and a hotter camshaft. The R4 was similar, but was normally aspirated with dual four-barrel carburetors and a 12.0:1 compression ratio. The experimental R5, never seriously intended for production, had dual superchargers and Bendix fuel injection. Only 120 to 125 R3 and R4 engines were built and only a handful went into production cars.

1963 Studebaker Super Lark engine
The heart of the Studebaker R2 Super Jet Thrust engine: a Paxton SN-60 fixed-ratio centrifugal supercharger. This is similar to the unit later offered on the Shelby GT-350 Mustang. On the Studebaker 289 cu. in. (4,737 cc) V8, it was worth an additional 49 hp (37 kW) over the normally aspirated R1, despite the R2’s lower compression ratio, and added about 55 lb (25 kg) to the already-heavy engine. The supercharger could be troublesome, particularly if owners did not change its oil (Dexron automatic transmission fluid) at the specified intervals.

You’ll notice that we haven’t quoted any horsepower numbers for these cars. When Studebaker introduced the R1 and R2 engines, their power and torque outputs were left blank on the official specifications table. The likely reason was that those figures weren’t very impressive compared to the Avanti’s principal competitors, particularly the Corvette, whose top engine was rated at 360 gross horsepower (269 kW). Finally, very late in 1963 (well into the 1964 model year), Studebaker belatedly announced ratings of 240 gross horsepower (179 kW) for the R1, 289 hp (216 kW) for the R2, 335 hp (250 kW) for the R3, and 280 hp (209 kW) for the R4.

Although intended for the Avanti, the point of the exercise was to add luster to the entire Studebaker line. Therefore, when the R1 and R2 engines debuted, they became optional on the Studebaker Lark and GT Hawk, priced at $210 for the R1 and $372 for the R2. (The R3, which also included extensive chassis modifications, cost over $1,000, part of the reason it was rarely ordered.) Buyers could also specify heavy-duty suspension, a tachometer, and a new Studebaker option: front disc brakes. Made by Bendix under license from Lockheed, these brakes were functionally identical to those of contemporary Jaguars. At the time, no other U.S. manufacturer offered discs; even the Corvette wouldn’t get them until 1965.

1963 Studebaker Super Lark R2 badge
These discreet badges were the only exterior warning of the supercharged Studebaker Lark’s potential. An R2-powered Super Lark was not the fastest car in America in 1963, but its acceleration and top speed put it in with some very elite company.

Unlike most of its compact brethren, the Studebaker Lark had been available with a V8 from the start — the Ford Falcon, Plymouth Valiant, and Dodge Dart wouldn’t have a V8 until 1963. Since 1962, the Lark had also been available with a four-speed transmission, the same Borg-Warner T-10 found in contemporary Corvettes. A Lark with the non-R-series 289 (4,737 cc) engine and four-speed was already fairly quick. With the R1 or R2, it became something else entirely.

STUDEBAKER SUPER LARK

Studebaker initially did not promote the availability of the Jet Thrust engines in the Lark. Unless a buyer carefully perused the catalog, those options were easy to miss. Studebaker’s reluctance to promote the R1 and R2 engines in the regular cars may have been out of a fear of overshadowing the Avanti, which was off to a very slow start. The fiberglass coupe had been announced in May 1962, but production issues had delayed its actual introduction and eventual sales were slow. Part of the problem was that in recent years, Studebaker dealers had made their living selling economy cars, not sporty performance, and few salesmen really understood or even cared about the Avanti or the hot engines.

In March 1963, Andy Granatelli took a couple of R2-equipped Studebaker Larks, GT Hawks, and Avantis to the Bonneville Salt Flats for speed trials. A supercharged Lark with a 3.31 axle reached a top speed of 132 mph (213 km/h), an impressive performance for any stock sedan of the time.

1963 Studebaker Super Lark rear 3q
Most Super Lark packages were ordered with the sportier Daytona hardtop, but the package (and the R1 and R2 engines individually) were available on any Studebaker Lark, even the basic Standard. The pillared two-door sedan may not have been as sporty as the hardtop, but it was stiffer and some 100 lb (45 kg) lighter.

In April, Studebaker belatedly introduced a special performance package for the Lark, naturally called Super Lark. It was not a separate model, but an option package available on any Studebaker Lark. (A similar package was offered for the Hawk.) It included either the R1 or R2 engine, a Dana 44 limited-slip rear axle (which Studebaker called Twin-Traction), front disc brakes, a new gauge cluster with a tachometer, and the heavy-duty suspension package developed for the Avanti, with front and rear anti-roll bars and trailing links to supplement the standard rear leaf springs.

The total package was not cheap — the R2 package cost $680.02 on a Custom sedan like our photo subject, which didn’t include the four-speed manual, an extra $188.30 — but it made the Lark a fearsome performer. The Lark’s handling still left much to be desired even with the heavy-duty suspension, but only a handful of street cars could match its straight-line speed. A four-speed Super Lark R2 was capable of 0-60 mph (0-97 km/h) in a bit over 7 seconds and the quarter mile (402 meters) in the 15-second range despite an obstructive shift linkage. Even with the optional “Power Shift” Borg-Warner automatic, Car Life clocked a supercharged Lark Daytona at 0-60 mph (0-97 km/h) in 7.8 seconds and ran the standing quarter in 16.2 seconds at 87 mph (140 km/h). Inevitably, a Lark so equipped was no longer an economy car; Motor Trend‘s R2 Super Lark averaged a mediocre 13 mpg (18 L /100 km).

The lack of factory horsepower ratings kept the Super Lark out of the NHRA’s drag-racing stock classes, which were based on advertised horsepower and shipping weight. It’s unclear if that was intentional, but it probably robbed Studebaker of a certain amount of publicity.

1963 Studebaker Super Lark rear
The Studebaker Lark’s Super Lark package included a Dana 44 rear axle (familiar for years to off-roaders) and limited-slip differential. Studebaker-Packard was the first American manufacturer to popularize the limited-slip differential, which they called “Twin Traction,” starting in 1956. We believe the standard axle ratio with the R2 engine was 3.73 to one, but 3.31, 3.54, 4.09, and 4.55 ratios were optional.

THE BOTTOM OF THE BARREL

The company could have used the good press because sales of the Studebaker Lark dropped to 74,201 for 1963, down nearly 20,000 units from 1962. Lark buyers were apparently unimpressed by the Super Lark. They bought Larks because they were economical and relatively cheap, not for their performance. (Much the same was true of the Big Three compacts. As popular as the sporty-looking Ford Falcon Futura was, for example, the V8-powered Futura Sprint was a flop and only about 25% of Valiant and Dart buyers opted for a V8.) Former Studebaker employee Fred Bartz recalls that dealers had a great deal of trouble selling the supercharged cars even when they bothered to order them. The Studebaker Avanti, meanwhile, had turned out to be an expensive sales disaster, selling only 4,643 units in two model years.

The 1964 Lark wasn’t looking any more promising despite another Brooks Stevens facelift that made it look rather like a Lancia Fulvia Berlina. Studebaker’s automotive division lost over $25 million in 1963. Even with the profits from the other divisions, it still added up to a $16.9 million net loss.

Sherwood Egbert was by then a very sick man. He had been diagnosed with stomach cancer, and while he tried to work through it, he was repeatedly hospitalized. In November 1963, Studebaker announced that he was on an indefinite medical leave of absence, convalescing in Palm Springs. Egbert formally resigned on November 22.

1965 Studebaker Cruiser front 3q
Brooks Stevens facelifted the Studebaker Lark again for 1964 and that basic design was retained when production moved to Canada, although it got a final facelift by Bob Marck for 1966. Studebaker phased out the Lark name starting in 1964, apparently at Stevens’ suggestion, and it was dropped entirely for 1965. We believe this is a 1965 Studebaker Cruiser, which means it has a Chevrolet engine, either the 194 cu. in. (3,184 cc) six or 283 cu. in. (4,638 cc) V8 also used in Chevrolet trucks.

In his place, the board appointed finance VP Byers Burlingame, a former Packard exec. Burlingame made a last-ditch attempt to obtain financing for new models, but without success. Less than a month after Egbert’s departure, Studebaker shut down production in South Bend.

That might have been the end of the line, but Gordon Grundy, head of Studebaker’s Canadian operation, pointed out that the factory in Hamilton, Ontario, which was Studebaker’s most modern plant, could continue to produce an existing design with a break-even level of only 20,000 units per year. Production tooling for the Studebaker Lark was transferred to Hamilton, although the Hawk and Avanti were dropped, as were Studebaker’s trucks. Studebaker engines were retained for the rest of the 1964 model year, but after that, the company opted to purchase sixes and V8s from Chevrolet.

Since Studebaker lost more than $80 million in 1964, including charge-offs for shutting down the South Bend factory, they didn’t have the capital to do much more with the cars, but the company did hire Bob Marcks, an ex-Loewy designer, to perform one last facelift on the 1966 Studebaker models, and pursued additional distribution deals with foreign automakers (including Datsun, Toyota, and Isuzu.

Nothing came of those negotiations, and it was now clear that the remaining Studebaker — no longer called Lark — was no longer a viable product. Sales for 1965 totaled 19,435, followed by only 8,947 cars for the 1966 model year. Production ended in March 1966, although local assembly in some countries (from CKD kits produced in either South Bend or Hamilton) may have continued for a while after that. One source suggests that the last Israeli-built Larks, built in the former Kaiser-Eilin plant in Haifa, weren’t completed until 1967.

1965 Studebaker Cruiser rear 3q
This car’s unusual taillight design was Brooks Stevens’ trick for disguising the fact that the 1964-1966 Studebaker shares the same body as the 1962–63 cars. A 1965 Studebaker Cruiser sedan had a base price of $2,470 with a six, $2,610 with a V8. It was not a particularly attractive price — the V8 was $233 more than a Chevrolet Chevelle sedan, which had essentially the same engine!

Although Studebaker was now out of the automobile business for good, the company survived, becoming Studebaker-Worthington in 1967. Several of its subsidiaries became very successful, particularly Chemical Compounds, which Andy Granatelli took over late in 1963 and later renamed STP. Studebaker’s last corporate remnant was the Studebaker-Worthington Leasing Company, a subsidiary of State Bank of Long Island, which was bought by Main Street Bank of Texas in 2008.

The last automotive appearance of the Studebaker name to date was the Avanti Studebaker, a.k.a. Studebaker XUV, a big sport utility vehicle that the Avanti Motor Corporation displayed on the auto show circuit in 2003. The SUV’s appearance provoked a lawsuit by General Motors, which contended that the design was too close to that of GM’s HUMMER. The suit was eventually settled, but the XUV never went into production and Avanti shut down in 2007.

As for Paxton, Joe and Vince Granatelli continued to run it after Andy’s departure. After being spun off from Studebaker-Worthington in 1974, Paxton shifted focus to industrial blowers, deciding that the market for automotive performance parts was effectively dead. By 1979, however, the company was once again in the automotive aftermarket, developing a new line of emissions-legal products. In 1988, Paxton superchargers were once again offered on the Avanti, albeit only the limited-edition Silver Anniversary model.

Paxton still exists today, but the industrial and automotive divisions were split in 1998; the latter merged in April 2001 with Vortech. In 2000, Craig Conley’s Paradise Wheels, Inc., based in San Marcos, California, bought the manufacturing rights and all remaining parts for the older ball-drive Paxton and McCulloch superchargers, which remain in production. Paxton Automotive, meanwhile, continues to sell superchargers, but they’re now gear-driven NOVI units.

Other than the Avanti, which enjoyed a strange second life (as we’ve previously recounted), Studebaker is little remembered today, except perhaps in South Bend, Indiana, which naturally still maintains a Studebaker museum. Nearly 564,000 Studebaker Larks were built in all — though not all of them used the Lark name — but they have become a rare sight today, particularly a supercharged Super Lark like our photo car. We have found no production figures for the R2 Larks, but we have heard estimates as low as 200 and even the most generous guess is not more than a few hundred. According to one source, only one R3 and one R4 Lark were ever built.

We have a particular affection for the Super Lark. With the complete high-performance package, it was essentially an Avanti clad in an unassuming sedan body. Nobody is going to call a Studebaker Lark a sexy car, even compared to the Falcon or Valiant, but it hasn’t been tarnished by aesthetically dubious latter-day derivatives the way its Avanti sister has. Mechanically, the Lark is a bit crude — its platform and suspension were already dated in 1963 — but that’s part of its charm. It’s a Q-ship, a mean little sleeper capable of embarrassing many faster-looking cars.

Very little would have saved Studebaker by the time the Super Lark was conceived. Even if the Avanti, Super Hawk, and Super Lark had been great successes, we see no way the automaker could have survived much longer than it did. The Avanti and the Jet Thrust cars were a sort of desperate automotive Alamo, driven as much by Egbert’s irrepressible (if groundless) optimism as any coherent strategy. Nonetheless, there’s certainly something to be said for going out in a blaze of glory.

FIN

NOTES ON SOURCES

Our principal sources on the downfall of Studebaker and the origins of the Lark included David Traver Adolphus, “1958: Altered to Fit: The 1958 Hawk, a Packard that Packard fans love to hate,” Hemmings Classic Car #16 (January 2006), pp. 28–35; the Auto Editors of Consumer Guide, Cars That Never Were: The Prototypes (Skokie, IL: Publications International, 1981); Encyclopedia of American Cars: Over 65 Years of Automotive History, (Lincolnwood, IL: Publications International, 1996); and “How Avanti Cars Work,” HowStuffWorks.com, 13 June 2007, auto.howstuffworks. com/avanti-cars.htm, accessed 9 June 2008; Thomas Bonsall, More Than They Promised: The Studebaker Story (Chicago, IL: Stanford University Press, 2000); Gene Booth, “Sherwood’s Forest,” Car Life Vol. 11, No. 6 (June 1963): 12–19; Douglas Brinkley, Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company, and a Century of Progress (New York: Viking Press, 2003); Arch Brown, “The Man Behind the ‘600’: George W. Mason,” Special Interest Autos #60 (November-December 1980) and “Another Visit with George Romney,” Special Interest Autos #77 (September-October 1983), reprinted in The Hemmings Motor News Book of Hudsons: driveReports from Special Interest Autos magazine, ed. Terry Ehrich (Bennington, VT: Hemmings Motor News: 2001); and “Why Studebaker-Packard Never Merged With AMC and other revelations by Governor George Romney,” Special Interest Autos #66 (December 1981), pp. 50-55; Fred Fox, “1963 R2 Lark: Studebaker’s Supercharged Sleeper,” Special Interest Autos #57 (June 1980); Patrick J. Furlong, “Avanti: Sherwood Egbert’s Dream Car,” Traces Vol. 6, No. 2 (Spring 1994): 42–47; Ken Gross, “1960 Lark Convertible: How Studebaker beat the Big Three to the compact punch,” Special Interest Autos #42 (November-December 1977); Geoffrey Hacker, “Petersen Motoramas,” Forgotten Fiberglass, n.d., www.forgottenfiberglass. com/ ?page_id=553, accessed 22 June 2011; Michael Lamm, “A Supercharged Kaiser-Darrin,” Special Interest Autos #2 (November-December 1970), reprinted in The Hemmings Book of Postwar American Independents: driveReports from Special Interest Autos magazine; Richard M. Langworth, Kaiser-Frazer, the Last Onslaught on Detroit: An Intimate Behind the Scenes Study of the Postwar American Car Industry (Automobile Quarterly Library Series) (Boston, MA: E.P. Dutton, 1975), and “When Henry J. Didn’t Get His Way,” Special Interest Autos #52 (August 1979), pp. 18-23; Jim Moody, The McCulloch Supercharger Website, 5 October 2006, www.vs57. com, accessed 30 August 2009; 2006 the Paradise Wheels, Inc., website, paradisewheels. biz, last accessed 5 September 2015; Ronald J. Ostrow, “Putting the Eggs in Several Baskets,” Car Life Vol. 11, No. 6 (June 1963): 14–17; the Paxton Automotive website, www.paxtonauto. com, last accessed 5 September 2015; “PERSONNEL: Changes of the Week,” TIME 25 October 1954, www.time. com, accessed 26 December 2009; André Ritizinger, “Studebaker 1963 range,” RitzSite, n.d., ritzsite. nl/ 63Stude/01_63stude.htm, accessed 30 August 2009; “Sherwood Harry Egbert,” Find a Grave Memorial, n.d., www.findagrave. com/ memorial/ 61201529/sherwood-harry-egbert, accessed 18 September 2021; “State of Business: Step This Way, Please!” TIME 19 May 1952, p. 99; Daniel Strohl, “1956 Parklane Performer” and “McCulloch supercharger history,” Hemmings Classic Car #16 (January 2006), p. 20–27; Studebaker Corporation, “63 Avanti Lark Cruiser Hawk” [brochure PD 63-14, ca. 1963] and “Studebaker” [brochure PD 64-10, ca. 1964]; Daniel Rich Taylor, “Variations on a Soaring Theme” and “How Studebaker Came Not to Be,” Special Interest Autos #25 (November-December 1974); “Those Phony Car Ads,” Kiplinger’s Personal Finance June 1958, pp. 41–44; and James Arthur Ward, The Fall of the Packard Motor Car Company (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995).

We also consulted the road tests “Studebaker Lark Daytona R2,” Car Life June 1963, and Jim Wright, “1964 Studebaker Super Lark,” Motor Trend December 1963, reprinted in Studebaker Hawks & Larks Limited Edition Premier, ed. R.M. Clarke (Cobham, England: Brooklands Books Ltd., ca. 2008); and Bob McVay, “Studebaker Cruiser Road Test,” Motor Trend January 1965, pp. 60-63.

Additional details on the rare R3 engine came from Fred Fox’s article “Six Week Wonder: 1963 Studebaker Avanti,” Special Interest Autos #32 (January-February 1976), reprinted in The Hemmings Book of Postwar American Independents, and “Studebaker R3 Avanti: America’s Fastest Car?” Special Interest Autos #96 (November-December 1986), reprinted in The Hemmings Motor News Book of Studebakers; Craig Fitzgerald, “South Bend Stealth,” Hemmings Muscle Machines #11 (August 2004); and Daniel Strohl, “Flying Tomato,” Hemmings Muscle Machines #47 (August 2007). Andy Granatelli’s witty account of his involvement with Studebaker can be found in his memoir, They Call Me Mister 500 (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1969).

Additional Avanti data came from Matthew Chess’s [now defunct] Avanti Source Home Page, avantisource. com history.html, accessed 9 June 2008; the Avanti Motors company website, Avanti Motors, 27 October 2006, www.avantimotors. com, accessed 10 June 2008; “GM and Avanti Settle Dispute – Studebaker XUV Will Go Into Production Soon,” The Auto Channel, 8 August 2003, www.theautochannel. com, accessed 9 June 2008; Tudor Van Hampton, “Distinctive Studebaker Avanti is once again up for sale,” The Seattle Times, NWautos, 2 September 2012, blog.nwautos. com, accessed 5 September 2015; and Leslie Clark Stipek, “About Michael Eugene Kelly,” www.lesliestipek. com/michaelekelly.asp, 9 May 2008, accessed 9 June 2008.

We subsequently did additional research into Studebaker’s export business (which included CKD assembly operations in at least six countries), consulting Jim Donnelly, “Clearing the Record,” Hemmings Classic Car December 2007, and “Vanished in Haifa,” Hemmings Classic Car #34 (July 2007); Patrick Foster, “Could Studebaker Have Survived?” Hemmings Classic Car #28 (January 2007); “Israel to Assemble 5.000 Studebaker Cars a Year; Some for Export,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency 9 March 1960, archive.jta. org, accessed 6 September 2011; “Studebaker South Africa,” Bob’s Studebaker Resource Website, 2011, www.studebaker-info. org/Dealers/ studeSA.html, accessed 6 September 2011; the Studebaker page at Coche Argentino, www.cocheargentino. com.ar/s/ studebaker.htm, accessed 6 September 2011; and comments by Milaca, Jim Quigley, NZ George, et al (which reference an article in the September 1993 issue of Turning Wheels, to which we did not have access) at the Studebaker Drivers Club forum, 26-31 May 2010, forum.studebakerdriversclub. com/ archive/index.php?t-41108.html, accessed 6 September 2011. Special thanks to Ronnie Schreiber of Cars in Depth for bringing the Israeli-built Lark to our attention. Ronnie wrote his own article on those cars, “No, the Last Studebaker Ever Did Not Roll Off the Lines in Canada. The Last Stude Had an Israeli Accent,” on 10 August 2011 (www.rokemneedlearts. com/ carsindepth/wordpressblog/?p=3630, accessed 6 September 2011).

This article’s title was suggested by the 1903 George Bernard Shaw play Man and Superman.


62 Comments

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  1. I appreciate this version of the history, a little grimmer and more likely realistic to the feeling at the time than the usual heroes-trying-to-save-a-sinking-ship narrative that attaches to Studebaker’s last years. What still pulls me in most about Studebaker from say the ’53 Starlight/Starliner coupes to the end is that somehow a series of designers convinced the company to produce Americanized versions of high-end European cars. I mean Bob Bourke at the Loewy firm for the ’53 models and again when they redid the coupes as the Hawks, Duncan McRae when he wasn’t forced to stick fins on everything, Brooks Stevens with his GT Hawk and Lark versions, and finally Loewy himself with the Avanti. The comment above about the last Lark looking like a Fulvia Berlina is spot on, and in some ways it’s actually a better design. More typically people seem to have been mystified both at the time and until now by how the Hawk was not really a sports car when from the European viewpoint its catgory is clear: 2+2 GT. And yet these cars weren’t simply aping Europe, they maintained a sober but distinctively American feel. Few American sedans of the sixties still look both as modern and as distinguished as a restored Lark Daytona, and none as small.

    1. Funny you should mention the Hawk — that will be coming up in a few weeks. The short answer, of course, is that they weren’t so much building Americanized versions of high-end European cars as they were trying to make increasingly dated American cars [i]look[/i] like high-end European cars. Studebaker-Packard was in such desperate shape that management’s primary concern was how cheaply they could dress up the familiar body shell.

      The Stevens GT Hawk is a case in point. It certainly looked like the sort of European GT that Stevens (and, to a lesser and far less sophisticated extent, Sherwood Egbert) liked, but the object of the exercise was to breathe some life into the old Hawk/Starliner body without spending very much on tooling.

      If S-P had had a lot more money, enough to afford new body shells, company management might have a lot fussier about making Studebakers look modern and American, but you know what they say about beggars and choosers.

      1. Good to hear the Hawk is coming up. Something that I’m not entirely clear on with the Hawk is the degree to which it really departed from the ’53-’54 coupes, also designed by Bob Bourke at the Loewy firm if I’m not mistaken. In other words, is the Hawk already what the GT Hawk would be even more so, as you say above: a designer-driven euro reskin of an existing platform? Of course the engines got a lot more powerful with the Hawk than they were earlier, but to my eye the design is already fairly soaked in European themes. I mean of course the first year of the Hawks before McRae put those awful fins on them. (Though I guess the fins alone show that management was willing to with any superficial change they thought might drum up sales, and the Euro look was probably sold to them that way by the designers.)

        At the same time I wonder about the whole series, as from the figures I’ve seen (assuming they are correct), about 108 thousand of the ’53-’54 coupes were sold, counting the President Speedster (first sign of the new performance focus), while the whole nine year run of the Hawk/GT Hawk only amounted to about 69 thousand cars. Clearly the Euro looks and big engines did little to keep the ship afloat. Even so, if you’ll accept my contention that these should be considered GT cars, 69k still amounts to more GTs than any European marque during the same time apart from Alfa.

        1. [quote]Something that I’m not entirely clear on with the Hawk is the degree to which it really departed from the ’53-’54 coupes, also designed by Bob Bourke at the Loewy firm if I’m not mistaken.[/quote]

          The answer is “very, very little.” In fact, the only exterior stamping that’s actually different is the hood, modified to allow the upright grille. Even the fins of the upper-series Hawks were just bolted on to the fins of the ’53-’54 body shell. For that matter, the stampings of the ’62-’63 GT Hawk were also basically the same, save for the new roof. Studebaker had almost no money for new tooling.

          The upper-series Hawks always had fins; Bob Bourke added them to the 1956 Golden Hawk. They were definitely not Bourke’s idea (nor were they McRae’s); Ken Elliott, Studebaker-Packard’s VP of sales, insisted on them. None of the designers, either from Loewy’s group or the later S-P in-house team, liked them at all.

          The only Studebaker coupe that was really designer driven in the sense you mean was the ’53 Starlight/Starliner (which was not originally intended as a production car). The Hawks, even the GT Hawk, were mostly budget driven. They were certainly influenced by European GTs, in part because those were cars that the stylists personally liked, but the central impetus of those designs was the nonexistent budget. After the Packard merger, the stylists were being told, “We need to make the new models look [i]different[/i], but we have no money for new tooling or sheet metal changes, so make the best of it.” At the same time, there was a lot of pressure from sales to add more brightwork, the fins, etc. It’s not unlike giving a chef $5 and a bag of marshmallows and telling her she has to make dinner for the whole office — the results may be dictated by the chef’s tastes and influences, but the starting parameters are going to have a big impact on the results!

          The Studebaker coupes are [i]gran turismos[/i] in the sense that a 1966 Mustang GT is a GT. They [i]look[/i] European, which was intentional, but their road manners are a lot more American than Continental. The late GT Hawks are closer, particularly with the Super Hawk package, but the chassis was still over 10 years old, and it wasn’t particularly sporty when it was new. The supercharged cars (and the Packard-engined ’56 Golden Hawk) were reasonably quick, particularly by European standards, but their handling was nothing special.

  2. An always interesting sidebar to the Studebaker saga is the “Studebaker Trees planted in New Carlisle,IN at the Studebaker test track.
    Google Earth the address:

    32136-32386 Western Ave
    New Carlisle, IN 46552

  3. in 1962 1963 my father richard ross raced awhite super lark for studebaker it had large #1 and stp on side car was built andy granatelli i always wanted to know what became of car car ran best time of 12.09 at131 dragway

  4. I lived in Hamilton, Ontario, where the Studebaker plant was located.
    My dad had a very used 48 Studie with suicide rear doors. This car had an overdrive. Dad forgot it was in overdrive on exiting a newly finished highway. Rolling across the back seat (no seatbelts) Many years later, revealing he thought it was going to roll.
    As kids we played in that car when it broke for the last time.
    A neighbour worked in the plant and had a very shiny Lark.
    At the time, and since, never understood how the company went under.
    Quite a story and a good read.
    Thanks very much.

  5. That Studebaker could so easily chop the bloated late-50s Champion down to the Lark’s size illustrates the design flexibility of the company’s sedan platform. Out of all of the early-1950s independents, Studebaker was the one that could have most plausibly produced a compact from the same platform as its family car line. (Kaiser toyed with the idea but ultimately went with the distinctly different Henry J.)

    This is an important, if often overlooked, point. None of the 1950s independents possessed the economies of scale to keep two distinct bodies competitive. For example, Studebaker had trouble maintaining the freshness of both its sedans and lower-slung coupes even though they shared the same chassis and, at least initially, some body parts (e.g., bumpers, windshields and dashboards).

    I’ve read somewhere (Moloney?) that Loewy initially proposed a unit-body compact for 1952. Too bad Studebaker didn’t stick to the bottom of the market rather than move up market with the Loewy coupes and increasingly large sedans. Studebaker might have usurped AMC’s extraordinary success in the late-50s and early-60s.

  6. Sean,

    I tackled the Hawk (and GT Hawk/Super Hawk) last year: the article is called “The Once and Future Coupe.” https://ateupwithmotor.com/model-histories/studebaker-hawk-history/

  7. My father and I currently own a 1966 Studebaker Lark. I would like to know if this is a true lark? I question it because of the emblems that came on the car when we purchased it are from both the lark and possibly the commander. I also need to know if anyone knows where I might be able to locate parts for this car. Not drive train, but mostly cosmetic. ie: trim pieces, suspension parts. Thanks for your time

    1. At least in the U.S. market, the ’66 Studebakers were not officially identified as Larks. A V8 four-door sedan was technically either a Studebaker Eight Commander or Studebaker Eight Cruiser. I don’t know if that was true of non-U.S. models, and of course it’s always possible that either a dealer or a previous owner added them after your car originally left the factory.

      As to whether it’s a true Lark, that’s sort of a philosophical question. Structurally, the ’65-’66 cars are still basically facelifts of the Lark shell, although obviously they have Chevy running gear. It’s sort of like the one about the mop: if you replace the mop head and then later replace the mop handle, is it still the same mop?

      I’m afraid I can’t be much help regarding parts. That might be a question better addressed to one of the Studebaker clubs or Stude-specific forums elsewhere on the web. Sorry!

  8. I have driven only Studebakers from my first, a 1948 Champion Starlite Coupe that I bought in 1953 till 1989. I still have 5 Studebakers, a 1955 President Hardtop, a 1963 Lark 2-door sedan and 3 Studebaker Avanti’s, all are R-2’s with Paxton Supercharger. One of the Avanti’s is RS-1101 which is the 100th car produced. I have owned a total of 9 Studebakers total and have never bought one new, sorry to say but, but loved every one I ever owned. My favorites were the 1947-1949 Starlite Coupes, the 1953 Starlite Coupes and Starliners and of course the 1963 Avanti. I always wanted to be a car designer and work for Studebaker but didn’t get the chance. Todays car designs are a JOKE.

  9. This article is very informative. I’ve lived in South Bend my entire life (52 yrs.), and have loved the marque ever since I found out that they were made here and my Grandfather worked for Studebaker. Always interested in information about the company and their cars.I hate it when ppl. disseminate inaccurate info under the guise of ‘knowledge’. Can’t wait to see the Super Hawk story!!-Sean M. Henderson,
    South Bend,Indidna.

  10. These brief histories of Studebaker are invaribly the same old yawn and dance. All the same theories abound about how this or that killed Studebaker. How this or that design was too little too late, or a rehash of a previous effort. The same could be said for EVERY car maker, had the end been the same. The fact is had Studebaker been part of the big 3, or perhaps the big 2, everything they built would have sold like hotcakes. Deep pockets were all that was needed. Cadillac would have expired long, long ago if not for GM propping up that division. Cadillac has been a dead brand for over 30 years, likewise Lincoln. “Chemical Compounds, which Andy Granatelli took over late in 1963 and renamed STP”. Among other tidbits in this story is this one, which is an outright lie. STP existed well back into the early 60’s. I have an original can and it is marked ‘Division of Studebaker-Packard Corporation’ which dates it 1962, or earlier.

    1. You’re incorrect about STP. The STP product existed in the early ’60s — it was invented in 1954 — but the company that made it was then formally known as the Chemical Compounds Division of Studebaker-Packard Corporation, originally based in St. Joseph, Missouri. That’s how it’s described in Studebaker’s August 5, 1963, press release on Andy Granatelli’s appointment, which is reproduced in full on pp. 229-230 of Granatelli’s memoir, They Call Me Mister 500, citation data for which is in the sources. Chemical Compounds was later renamed the STP Corporation, which went public in 1969.

  11. My dad got a call from Pete Shepard of Shepard Studebaker here in Cincinnati about an R2 Super Lark that a customer backed out on. He drove it and he bought it. His had the 3:73 ratio and he had a lot of fun street racing his ultimate sleeper. It was time for a valve job which Pete Shepard was going to do himself but another mechanic got a hold of it and my dad said it never ran the same. He traded it in 67 for the new Camaro. A lot of people make fun of Stude’s but they don’t know they were great car’s.

    1. Have my dad’s 1963 superlark in my garage. He bought it new in April, 1963 and it’s been sitting there since 1980. Depending on condition would sell as they are rare nowdays. Someone would either keep it original or change all the drivetrain to a ratrod for modern parts and reliability, plus maybe upgrade the interior to leather seating.

      1. Do you still have your dads Super Lark?

  12. Fascinating story. It’s too bad that, despite the best intentions, and the best efforts on everyone’s part, Studebaker failed to stay afloat. I used to know someone who had a 1960 Studebaker Lark VIII 4 door Sedan. It was an oxidised blue. It had a 4.2 litre V8 (259 cu in.) engine, seating for six adults comfortably. I don’t know exactly what the gross or net horsepower ratings were for the engine, but at the time, I didn’t really care. I found that it rode quite well. It handled good. It looked good, and it stopped good. Seeing a Studebaker Lark in person gave me something of a newfound respect for Studebaker cars I never had before. Prior to seeing a 1959 Lark, I thought that all Studebakers were ugly, rusted out hulks of cars that were destined for the scrapyard. This one was in beautiful shape, with no noticeable rust or imperfections. My favourite Larks are the 1959-61 model years and the 1964-66 model years.

    1. Jason, I agree with you about the most attractive year designs for the Lark!

  13. the horse power ratings of the r1 to r5 engines were a lot more than stated.. Dino HP tests show that..we had a 289 r1 lark ..253 hp not 240 a 3.07 diff ratio , Automatic avanti gearbox and got a top speed of 142 mph , the car was transported from the USA to NZ fully recond motor with geniune 289 avanti parts incliding new r1 cam and bearings etc Pete

    1. If the factory ratings were net figures, I would say 253 hp was probably just on the strong side of normal production variation or reflected a particularly sharp rebuild that put everything to factory spec. However, the 240 hp factory rating is a gross figure and thus is considerably more than a production engine with stock accessories and exhaust would produce at the clutch. A 253 hp figure at the clutch would be more like what I’d expect of a blueprinted R2, honestly.

  14. Studebaker larks rule

  15. Aaron, as usual, this is a great and thoroughly researched article with many interesting facets. I recall many Larks from the days of my childhood, as well as a Studebaker dealership building that “endured,” complete with its Lazy S painted on the wall, long after Studebaker was forgotten. The issues regarding its demise, which you have outlined in a number of articles, sound correct to me, having grown up in the area where Studebaker (sometimes called “Steadybuckers”) and Notre Dame were part of everyday life.

    There are many opinions on the demise of Studebaker, and of Packard, and (as one less than generous poster has observed) the failure of many other once-great marques. However, I think that your outlines have pretty much hit the mark (no pun intended!) on both Studebaker and Packard. It seems to be a quality of human nature, that a scapegoat must be identified as the cause of any tragedy or accident — perhaps it relieves the mind of having to comprehend the interplay of many complex issues and trends.

    I do want to point out one error in your fine article here: You said, “[the McCullough supercharger] also saw a fair amount of racing use, most notably with Novi’s Indianapolis 500 racers…” which is incorrect.

    Before WW2, Ford engine rebuilder and racing enthusiast Lew Welch worked with Bud Winfield (one of the famous Winfield brothers) to lay out the Novi V8 for use in the Harry Miller designed Ford racers that ran (sort of) in the 1935 Memorial Day race. Ed and Bud Winfield then took their drawings and ideas to Offenhauser’s designer, Leo Goosen, who designed a V8 in the typical Peugeot-Miller-Offenhauser way: Two cast iron blocks with integral DOHC two valve heads. bolted to a barrel crankcase. Like the Flathead Ford that the Novi replaced, the motor had three main bearings, retained in the barrel crankcase in the Miller way by diaphragm bulkheads retained by tabs. Unlike the Ford V8, however, the Novi used a flat crankshaft.

    Goosen had considerable experience designing superchargers, going all the way back to the first Miller implementations of the 1920s. For the Novi, he took power off of the front of the crank where the timing gears were mounted, ran a shaft in the “V” where a pushrod V8’s cam is located, and mounted the supercharger at the back of the block. By this time Goosen was treading a well-trodden path, as tremendous inertial forces accompanied the 10″ impeller spinning at 43,000 rpm, which would wreck any drivetrain from loading and unloading of the drive gears as the engine accelerated and decelerated.

    The solution to this (which took many forms in various Miller-based engines) was to make the supercharger driveshaft act as a torsion bar, which is what Goosen also did in the Novi design.

    The Novi soldiered on for years, tilting against the 4 cylinder Offenhauser/Meyer-Drakes, until in 1960, Lew Welch sold his cars, engines and parts to the Granatellis, who were involved with Paxton at the time, as you have noted. The Granatellis used their experience and dyno testing to note that the old Goosen-designed supercharger was very inefficient. They enlisted the help of long-time Indianapolis mechanic Jean Marcenac (whose experience went all the way back to his days with Ralph de Palma and Tommy Milton, as well as his leading role with the legendary Frank Lockhart) to sort out the supercharger, which was reduced to 8″ in diameter, as well as having redesigned vanes. Also, the housing was reshaped and redesigned.

    The new supercharger raised horsepower (on the Granatelli/Paxton dyno) from around 500 to 640, and the new supercharger produced 35 psi, versus only 25 psi. Fuel consumption was also dramatically reduced (always a sore point with the Novi), indicating that the old supercharger was consuming excessive amounts of power and turning it into heat.

    My point to this long-winded post is to note that the Indianapolis Novi superchargers, both old and new, were not Paxton units, although Paxton research was included in the second version by the Granatellis.

    This story is told in many places, but for this post, I have referred to Gordon Eliot White’s book “Offenhauser” and Roger Huntington’s book, “Design and Development of the Indy Car.”

    1. Thanks for the correction and the information on the Novi — I took out that reference in the text. I admit my knowledge of pure racing engines is at best marginal. I don’t follow racing as a sport, so what I do know centers on stock cars and rallying, and that mainly to understand the politics of homologation as they affect production cars.

  16. i would say the 64 model lark well my father had on alark auot in1965 the year he was found dead out side of his vech iwas juest 12yr;s at time
    but what would have to his personel since iwas heir along with my moyher thy were not devoriod the auto was lark black white peral gear shift red and bla ck interia with full chrome grill auto wereabouts he wassr.same as myarthur.

    1. Mr. Barnes,

      I’m afraid I’m not sure I understand your message — I didn’t post your other comment with your address because I’m not clear what you’re asking. Feel free to contact me via the contact form if you’d like to discuss it further. Thanks!

  17. When I was a child in the mid ’60’s, I had a book about cars that showed a picture of a Lark with rectangular headlights. The caption stated the Lark could be ordered with a 426 c.i.d. Hemi. Was this true?
    I have not read, or seen, that anywhere else.

    1. The 426 Hemi was a Chrysler engine offered in Dodges and Plymouths while the Lark was a Studebaker, so no, that was never a factory option! (Late Studebakers did use Chevrolet engines, however, bought in after Studebaker engine production shut down.) As for putting a 426 Hemi in a Lark, well… where there’s a will (and a wallet), many things are possible. The Mopar engine is physically very large and quite heavy, so I don’t know offhand how easily it would fit or how much surgery it might require, but I imagine it could be done if one were sufficiently inspired.

  18. As I end up repeating at least once a week, I’m afraid I can’t help with parts, repairs, or restoration. Sorry!

  19. After reading the very well written and informative articles about Studebaker and Packard I am left wondering if that in the merger plan talks between Nance and Romney, both very hard driving and career driven men, the possibilities were lost due to a personality conflict and the desire to be the number one executive and an inability to consider putting the interests of the companies first rather than their own. So close yet so far, alas.

    1. I think that was a significant factor, although not the only or even principal one. Nance was also dealing with the Packard board, which had bought into what turned out to be an overly optimistic pitch for the potential benefits of merging with Studebaker, based in part on financial data that Nance’s finance VP later said was inaccurate. They also accepted a lot of very rosy, “if all goes well” estimates of how much Studebaker and Packard could save by integrating their operations, unfortunately without sufficiently considering how long that would take, how much it would cost, and how much there was to go wrong. The Packard board had been fairly dismissive of Nash’s merger overtures before George Mason died, citing the logistical problems that would be involved in sharing production with Nash (which was true, but also applied to Studebaker).

      Before George Mason’s death, Nance had been pretty interested in the idea of a merger, I think assuming that even if Mason was in charge initially, Mason would retire in a few years and Nance would have the whole show — which in the case of a four-way Nash-Packard-Studebaker-Hudson merger would have given him a pretty respectable empire. The Packard board didn’t seem terribly enthusiastic before the Studebaker deal, so while I don’t think they were categorically resistant afterward, I think it put Nance in kind of an awkward political position. Having to go back to the same board and ask again for something they already turned down once before is dicey in general (they might get hostile and/or it might make people think you’re ineffectual). Doing that for a deal that no longer seemed as personally attractive and that would introduce a serious rival for everything he had been trying to achieve personally can’t have sounded very appetizing.

      I can’t claim to know what was in Nance’s head, of course, but he was not a fool, and I’d be surprised if he hadn’t had thoughts along those lines. Joining forces with Romney would basically have meant one or the other of them either having to leave or else accepting a second-banana role until retirement. Since everybody loves a counterfactual, I think it’s not unlikely Romney would have come out on top, if only by virtue of his faith in the Rambler. Within a couple of years, the Rambler line was gaining strength (leading to AMC’s decision to ditch the Nash and Hudson marques) while Studebaker-Packard was floundering and industry pundits were figuring it was circling the drain. So, had AMC merged with Studebaker-Packard in ’54, by 1955–56, all else being equal, Romney would have looked like the one with a vision and Nance like too little, too late.

      The wisest one of the bunch, in retrospect, ends up looking like Mason, who recognized that they were better off joining forces in the late ’40s, when they all had enough money to be able to sort it out. By 1953, they didn’t, and I can’t really see a four-tiered AMC working out much differently than it did even if Nance and Romney had been eager and mutually supportive collaborators. Hudson was basically the walking dead, Studebaker was in a financial hole they hadn’t yet noticed, Packard had lost too much ground to easily regain, and Nash was beginning a fairly dramatic retrenchment around compacts. Had they all pooled their resources, they still wouldn’t have had the capital for three or four viable marques (other than through BMC-style badge engineering). They might conceivably have managed to keep Packard going along with Rambler, but the realistic options for Packard were to keep grasping at Buick’s leftovers or take a very risky stab at Cadillac, both of which fell firmly into the “You want me to put my head IN the lion’s mouth?” category. Studebaker was stuck going up against Chevrolet and Ford, which wasn’t any easier and was probably tougher because even a merged S-P/AMC couldn’t have easily matched GM or Ford on volume or costs. Look at what happened when AMC tried it again later…

    2. Also, having two senior executives vying for power is not good for a company’s health either. The people a couple of levels down end up feeling like they have to choose sides and people below that have to walk on eggshells, because doing a good job for the wrong faction can still get you in trouble.

  20. Would things have been any different had Packard or later Studebaker-Packard (notwithstanding the Studebaker’s debt) accepted George Mason’s merger proposal?

    Additionally what would have been the effect of the remaining non-Big Three car manufacturers such as Packard / Studebaker-Packard, Kaiser-Jeep, Checker Motors and International Harvester, etc consolidating into one by becoming part of AMC during the 1950s?

    1. Assuming the ultimate thrust of the first question is “Would that have created a different, more positive outcome for those companies?” the answer is no, almost certainly not. The fundamental reason is that neither Nash, Packard, Studebaker, nor Studebaker-Packard had or were likely to get the kind of capital they needed to achieve any of the potential benefits of merging. Although the eventual endgame both Mason and Lehman Brothers were envisioning sounded attractive, it assumed integration of operations, GM-style shared bodies, and elimination of redundant facilities and overhead, without having a clear or achievable plan for achieving that in the face of the companies’ actual geographical dispersal and sometimes quite dated existing factories. Packard in ’55 demonstrated clearly the consequences of trying to move or consolidate production in a hurry with no capital; as for the consequences of sort of stumbling along without a real plan other than to start frantically shuttering plants when you can’t afford to keep the lights on, see British Leyland.

      Kaiser/Willys/Jeep, International Harvester, and especially Checker were small potatoes in the ’50s and not a lot bigger in the ’60s. Realistically, I think what would have happened is that Checker would have fairly quickly become a badge engineering job and Jeep and IH would have merged, with one or the other disappearing in all but (possibly) name) at the earliest opportunity. Rambler and Studebaker would have gone the same way. Packard might have stuck around somewhat longer as a nameplate, but probably wouldn’t have survived the ’60s. With a bit of different luck or going in different directions at opportune moments, the consolidated entity might have done better at certain points than AMC actually did, but the end result would likely be similar, although the names might have been different.

      The basic reason again is lack of capital and lack of access to capital. I think there’s a tendency (which I’ve admittedly been guilty of myself) to overstate or overestimate the importance of specific product or engineering decisions, but the unfortunate reality is that it more often comes down to money and resources. As with people, companies with deep pockets and lots of assets can get away with a lot of serious errors in judgment whereas smaller and poorer ones often have trouble surviving even one or two.

      1. Could probably see this automotive combine being composed of AMC, Jeep and Packard.

        Otherwise unsure how things could have developed apart from AMC retaining the 2.0-4.0-litre 4/6-cylinder Tornado in place of the AMC Straight-4/6 and the adoption of properly-developed Avanti-like styling by Raymond Loewy on AMC models at some point.

        Packard is another matter though, particularly whether there was any development potential left in the Packard V8, if the Packard V8 was replaced by the AMC V8 or merited a new engine.

        Have thought about this alternate AMC cooperating with Fiat and Citroen from the mid to late 1960s, since it would have allowed AMC to transition to FWD much earlier on regular AMC models (up to Maserati Quattroporte II / Citroen SM sized platforms with conventional suspension) and additionally allow them to utilize engines or spin off new designs from existing engines.

        For example. Fiat developed a 60-degree V6 for the Fiat 130 that was capable of being enlarged to around 3.8-litres and spawned the Fiat 128 SOHC 4-cylinder, such a layout would have also allowed for a V12 of up to 7.7-litres to be utilized by Packard. A Twin-Cam derived 90-degree V8 mirroring the above and displacing up to 4222cc (via the Lancia Rally 037) is also theoretically possible along with a Twin-Cam derived Straight-6.

        There is also the Maserati V8s, both the existing 4.1-4.9-litre version as well as the stillborn 4-litre V8 derived from the Maserati V6 that was theoretically capable of displacing around 3.0-4.3-litres (the latter via the 3.2-litre V6 tested in the Maserati Quattroporte II project in Marc Sonnery’s book on Maserati under Citroen).

        With AMC adopting FWD and Jeep remaining 4WD, Packard would continue to use RWD though some models may end up featuring optional 4WD or even spawn a Range Rover challenger akin to the International Harvester based Monteverdi Safari under the Packard or Jeep badges.

        1. The disconnect here is the distinction between the straightforward counterfactual (what would have happened if Studebaker and Packard had merged with Nash in the early ’50s) and an alternate reality where the factors that the companies struggled with in the ’50s and ’60s somehow hadn’t existed or didn’t matter, allowing the formation of an imaginary company incorporating what fans see as the interesting bits of the actual companies. I’m not unsympathetic to the latter, but these are obviously very different questions.

          1. Admittingly the above scenario does not take other factors into account and leads to the rationalization of marques down to 3, though it is certainly a more appealing route involving Fiat and Citroen compared to what happened with Renault.

            Would AMC have been receptive to some version of the Studebaker-Porsche 542 and 633 proposals, particularly the latter as a Metropolitan replacement?

          2. Romney would probably have at least looked at it, although how interested he would have been would have depended a lot on costs. (He did revive the original short-wheelbase Rambler as the Rambler American in ’58, which was roughly similar to the 633 in dimensions, though not in powertrain.) The chief attraction of the Metropolitan, as Mason and Romney saw it, was that the tooling and manufacturing costs were pretty trivial by American standards — off-the-shelf Austin powertrain, cheap British assembly. There was not a huge market for it in the U.S., and a lot of what there was could probably have been satisfied well enough by the short-wheelbase Rambler, but the investment was so low that AMC could keep offering it for quite a while as long as they didn’t spend any real money on it.

            So, if someone had said, “We can build something like the 633 for you and your upfront costs will be minimal,” he might well have said yes, or at least given it real thought. However, if it involved making a case for a meaningful tooling expenditure (which with a different powertrain layout and all-new engine would have been substantial), I imagine he’d have found reasons to say no.

          3. The Type 633 would have at least allowed AMC to have a fresh design at that segment, though would have probably made it a 4-door from the outset.

            The only issue would be Type 633’s lack of commonality with other models within AMC, yet it depends whether AMC could develop a small 1600-2000cc more conventional front-engined rear-wheel-drive model in the mold of a Ford Cortina I/II or Hillman Avenger instead of curiosities like the Gremlin. The latter of which had it appeared in the 1960s and featured Avanti-like styling on a SWB 100-inch Rambler American platform, would have been less of an oddball.

            It is interesting to note how the Metropolitan shares the same width as the 1954-1958 Austin Cambridge (A40/A50/A55), suggesting the Metropolitan’s platform would be best described as a SWB Austin Cambridge.

          4. I keep saying this, but the question was not whether AMC or Studebaker else could design this or that; the question was whether they could afford the tooling costs even if they saw the need for it. At the time the 633 was developed, AMC had no particular need for such a thing. They had the Rambler American (which had been available with four doors for a while), which by U.S. standards was already a subcompact and which used existing mechanical bits. Sales were modest, not something a “fresh design” or oddball Avanti-derived styling would have improved, so the business case for a clean-sheet car with no mechanical commonality with other AMC models would not have been strong. By the time AMC needed it, the Type 633 would have been very dated and RR layouts were becoming a tough sell for everyone but U.S. Volkswagen buyers.

            The Cortina made sense for Ford because it was primarily for England and Commonwealth export markets, so selling it in the U.S. didn’t require a lot of tough decisions about whether it was worth building. AMC didn’t really have that, and while IKA (which built Ramblers in Argentina from the early sixties through about 1973) would probably have liked it, I don’t think even the two companies together could have justified the expense. By the ’70s, when AMC desperately needed something like that, they definitely couldn’t afford it — hence the Gremlin.

        2. Also, although it’s really far afield of the subject of this article and something I had hoped to discuss in greater detail in a separate article, the original Tornado six was not a particularly good engine. IKA eventually rectified most of its infirmities, mostly out of necessity, but the early engine offered no advantage over AMC’s subsequent Torque Command six, which was cam-in-block, but of much more modern architecture. If one were to do an OHC conversion of the AMC/Jeep inline six, you wouldn’t want to approach it like Kaiser did the Tornado. (Again, the later ’70s IKA version was better, but its relationship to the original Sampietro design was modest.)

          1. While the Tornado had it problems, what IKA managed to achieve with the engine in the Torino and what the latter was putting out in terms of power is what I had in mind along with the 4-cylinder Sampietro engines used in Jeeps.

            Particularly as the Tornado would have allowed for a 2-litre 4-cylinder OHC unit (via the 2968cc engine in the IKA Torino) that would have put out fairly decent power, however envision the Tornado 4/6-cylinder engine eventually replaced in the late-1960s to early-1970s with a new generation of 4-cylinder and V6 engines.

            Heard the AMC Straight-4/6 engines were capable of being developed into 5-cylinder and dieselized variants, though its power figures look rather unimpressive and a step backwards unless the IKA Torino;s power figures were being quoted in gross rather than net.

          2. As far as I know, the Torino’s power ratings were SAE gross, except maybe toward the very end. The original Tornado engine had 155 gross hp or 140 net, with Kaiser usually quoting the latter; early 3.8 Torinos quoted 155 hp, and IKA Ramblers with that engine were a bit less. However, I should note that 155 gross horsepower was also the output of the AMC Torque Command engine in its 2V form — this is what I mean about there really not being a meaningful advantage!

            The Tornado engine was based on the antediluvian Continental Red Seal L-head engine, which Kaiser had acquired a decade or so previously. Although it was better than the original flathead, Sampietro’s head design was frankly very limited and it took a lot of work on IKA’s part to resuscitate its breathing. The engine was also physically large and quite heavy; IKA’s cutting it down to a four was from hunger, not because it had promise in that area! (The Continental-based IKA four was not related to the Lightning and Hurricane engines used in Jeeps, which were Willys engines of similar antiquity.) In terms of basic architecture, it was really not a modern engine by any stretch of the imagination. It existed because neither Kaiser-Jeep nor IKA had the money for an all-new engine.

            If one wanted to make an OHC six from a cam-in-block engine, the Torque Command I-6 — which was an actual modern engine designed in the same decade it came into use, not a prewar leftover — would have been a much better starting point, and the Sampietro Tornado head is not the one you’d probably choose. (Looking at the layout, I assume being as cheap as possible was an important part of the design brief.) And if there was need for a decent four that one expected to sell in meaningful numbers (i.e., not a loss leader like the Chevy II four or a low-volume product like the Jeep), it would be better to start over with a less bulky design not encumbered by big six bore spacing and deck height.

          3. Was thinking in regards to the South American IKA Torino that was putting out figures as high as 185-248 hp.

            So AMC would have been better off developing a more advanced and less bulky Euro-sized Straight-4/6 or even a related Straight-4/V6 engine family below the existing AMC Straight-4/6?

          4. The initial Torino 380W developed 176 hp and the later GS 200 had 215 hp, but those are SAE gross figures (and without emissions controls). Of course, the Tornado engine could put out a great deal more power than that in racing tune, but that sacrificed quite a bit in street driveability, as is usually the way. For U.S. consumption, there were any number of modern small thinwall V-8s (including AMC’s second-generation V-8) that were superior in every respect except maybe fuel economy, and then only marginally. (Fitting a 3.8-liter six with three Weber 45 DCOE carburetors is not an economy-minded choice, as it turns out.) The more mildly tuned Tornado engines were more economical, but not substantially more powerful than the AMC six and also heavier.

          5. Understand, am convinced the Tornado was an aging heavy design despite the OHC layout and apparent power in the South American Torino.

            Speaking of the AMC Straight-4/6, heard rumors it was capable of spawning sohc / twin-cam, turbocharged, all-alloy block / alloy cylinder head, 5-cylinder and dieselized variants though not sure whether such developments were truly the case or not with the AMC Straight-4/6 having similar unexploited development potential as the Chrysler Slant-6 mentioned in the Allpar article.

            Also wonder what the minimum displacement range was for both the AMC Straight-4/6 and whether 2-litre inline-4 and 3-litre inline-6 were feasible?

            Additionally did AMC ever investigate developing an in-house V6 project, possibly derived from the air-cooled V4 or a clean-sheet design?

          6. All manner of cam-in-block engines can potentially be converted to SOHC or DOHC layouts if someone is so inclined — there’s ample precedent for that, ranging from the Toyota T-system engines to Ford’s latter-day Cologne V-6. Diesels are harder because there are potentially block strength limits. I don’t have any information about AMC experimental engine projects, so I don’t know how seriously AMC considered any of those options. AMC DID later cut down the six into a four-cylinder engine, the 2,464cc engine used in some ’80s Jeeps; making a four of an inline-six or vice versa is not a difficult exercise, although a four derived from a six may be rather large for its job. The smallest stock version of the Torque Command engine was 3,258cc, with a 3-inch stroke. I can’t see any particular reason you couldn’t have de-bored it a little more (to around 3 5/8ths inches) to make it 3 liters, although why you’d want to is not clear. It wouldn’t have bought you much in terms of economy, it would have cost you some torque, and it still would have qualified as excessive by the standards of countries with taxable horsepower rules.

          7. I confess I’m having a hard time grasping the thrust of a lot of these speculations. The central theme seems to what extent existing engines could be stretched for purposes or configurations for which they weren’t originally designed; the answer is almost always, “Often quite a bit, but to what end?” A lot really depends on the intended application — for instance, as I’ve said before, building two quite different engines on the same lines can be an advantage in some circumstances and a hindrance in others. That in turn depends a lot on what period you’re talking about as well as for what market. In some cases, an engine option that would have been a useful commercial advantage in 1975 America would have been a tough sell 10 or 15 years earlier and vice versa, even for Rambler. Also, the displacement-based strictures so important in most European markets or in Japan really did not exist at all in the States in any meaningful way and for the most part still don’t; a lot of C-segment cars here have 2.5-liter engines! In the ’60s, Americans considered 3 liters dinky, so for the domestic market, the value of 180 cubic inches over 200 cu. in. was pretty much nil.

          8. Am basically interested to know what AMC (along with other small US carmakers that could have been part of AMC early on such as Studebaker, Packard, Kaiser-Jeep, etc) had in its arsenal or experimental department that would have greatly benefited the company, at least in holding out a bit longer as an independent concern prior to striking up an equal partnership with another company as opposed to ultimately getting swallowed up by one of the big 3.

            Heard of the AMC Straight-4/6 engine family having unexploited potential like the Chrysler Slant-6 though the AMC clubs have proved unhelpful in clarifying things as to what AMC had available in their experimental department.

            The possibly of AMC models being sold outside of the US was partly one of the reasons for the displacement 2-litre I4 / 3-litre I6 ideas (with SOHC/DOHC, multi-valves, fuel-injection and turbocharging making up for any potential shortfall in power), though another factor would be to prevent AMC from losing ground in the face of smaller European and Japanese imports.

            Meanwhile most of the older pre-1970s platforms and engines meanwhile could be pensioned off to somewhere in South America or elsewhere.

            AMC collaborating with Fiat/Citroen from the mid/late-1960s or another company, could have allowed the AMC to modernize its lineup by the late-1960s to early-1970s as well as maintain its image as a trendsetter in the US domestic market (possibly by embracing FWD) and greatly profit from the fuel crisis ridden 1970s.

            While understanding large 4-cylinder engines up to or even over 2.5-litres were fashionable even today in some respects, there was the 2-litre Ford Pinto (plus an even smaller 1.6-litre unit), (the admittingly Cosworth-developed) 2-litre Chevrolet Vega and even the AMC Gremlin featured a VW/Audi-sourced 2-litre 4-cylinder engine. Then there is the Chevrolet Chevette that while inexplicably featuring a 1.6-litre petrol in the US, featured 2-litre to even 2.3-litre petrol engines outside of the US.

            The main theme of my questions and speculations is what could AMC have done differently to both survive and thrive with the benefit of hindsight?

          9. As I said, I’m not familiar with AMC experimental powertrain stuff. I reiterate, though, that the issue for AMC, and Studebaker-Packard, was not a lack of engineering knowledge or product ideas. Every automaker had advanced engineering concepts and I daresay every automotive engineer has a whole mental shelf full of them. The issue was and remains capital.

            The independents’ principal problems in the ’50s were that a) their production facilities were neither as modern nor as efficient as those boasted by GM, which made for higher unit costs and a less competitive price position, especially in the lower-priced field; b) keeping up with the significant shifts in the expectations of American buyers and the rapid changes in styling and technology was a major strain on the smaller firms’ financial resources; c) their access to raw materials was capped by federal authorities during the Korean War based on their market share; d) most of them didn’t have significant non-automotive or non-U.S. business lines to beef up their reserves; e) the public increasingly began to question their future prospects, which had a corrosive effect on not only sales, but also resale values and their credit rating; and f) at least in the case of Studebaker, their accounting was enough of a mess that they didn’t grasp how much trouble they were in. It’s true that each of the independents had, at different points, some stylistic or mechanical shortcomings, but those were really the least of their problems!

            There’s a common fantasy that the independents would have survived, or held out longer, if they had pooled their resources, but in a capital sense, they really didn’t have a lot of resources to pool. Around 1956, when Studebaker-Packard was teetering, some wit compared the brands to two staggering drunks trying to prop each other up, which was unsympathetic but basically apt.

            AMC in the ’60s could have used some mechanical freshening up (proper ball joint front suspensions rather than trunnions, for one), but by mid-decade they had a very competent modern six, followed a couple years later by decent modern thinwall V-8. Their big problems in the ’60s were that the conditions that had let them briefly prosper in the late ’50s and early ’60s had changed, leaving them not only a bit off the beat in product terms, but also with a frumpy image they had a very hard time overcoming. Even if they’d had the resources to comprehensively address that sooner than they did, an earlier shift toward the ’60s zeitgeist would have again left them struggling after the OPEC embargo, when they suddenly were no longer economical enough to reclaim their late ’50s sensible econobox image. Their occasional public denials to the contrary, it’s not that they wouldn’t have liked to develop a more modern FWD subcompact to replace the Gremlin, or that they couldn’t have done it in engineering terms, but that they didn’t have the money to try and couldn’t convince anyone to give it to them.

            Even if one is mostly interested in counterfactual fantasy, like the prospect of a 3-liter DOHC version of the Torque Command six, that really is not separable from the larger issues. If AMC had had such an engine, what would they have put it in? A Gremlin X, with its flappy Hotchkiss rear end and funky styling? While that’s certainly an amusing idea, I’m not at all sure anyone would have bought such a thing, especially if the fancier engine cost substantially more than a V-8.

            Consider it in this light: Many people fantasize about owning an exotic sports car, attracted by the image of glamour and luxury. However, how practical or even enjoyable would such ownership be if it were not accompanied by the rest of the implicitly associated lifestyle? Would it really improve your standard of living if you only drove your Lamborghini to work, Tesco, and McDonald’s, where you were ordering from the Value Menu because paying for the upkeep and petrol of your Gallardo was really cutting into your spending money? The same thing applies here. Having one cool item worthy of James Bond does not make you James Bond, n’est c’est pas?

            I will grant that the idea of AMC in an alliance with Citroën is fascinating, but not necessarily in a positive way. Citroën is a company with a long history of daring engineering and bold design decisions that could hardly have been more out of step with what contemporary American buyers looked for in a family car (save perhaps for plush ride quality, something most U.S. customers preferred to achieve in a less ambitious fashion). The C4 Cactus is arguably the first Citroën product that might be within walking distance of American tastes, and of course it isn’t sold here.

          10. Regarding Citroen do not envision the bold styling or the hydropneumatic suspension being carried over to AMC (though a scenario where AMC includes Packard who keep and further develop the torsion level suspension is another matter in the case of the latter).

            Rather AMC could collaborate with both Fiat and Citroen prior to establishing a kind of PARDEVI like agreement, AMC could adopt FWD with conventional suspension for regular AMC models (that would include smaller V8s up to 4300cc or so) except for sportcars, Packards and Jeeps (the latter of which could be sold in Europe and allow for the possibility of smaller variants akin to early versions of the 1977 Jeep II and 1990 Jeep JJ concepts).

            AMC in such a scenario also could make use of more conventional front-engined RWD layouts via Fiat platforms such as the 124 / 131, 125 / 132 (& Argenta) and the 130 (plus a larger platform) or use some combination of FWD and RWD platforms.

            The company’s involvement with Citroen would be limited to the latter’s collaboration with Fiat on joint-developments such as the Citroen CX / Lancia Gamma FWD platform as well as the larger yet related Maserati Quattroporte II FWD platform along with the Citroen/Maserati V6 and V8 engines. Though there are another engines in Fiat/Citroen’s arsenal that could have been useful to AMC.

            It should also be possible for a smaller FWD platform to be utilized for an alternate AMC Gremlin, if not a more conventional RWD platform (in the event AMC somehow get cold feet on FWD) with either using componentry from Fiat/Citroen.

            One FWD route could be a Lancia Beta-derived platform, another could be a Fiat 131-sized model based on an upscaled Fiat 128 platform (which in terms of layout and dimensions would be indirect replacement for the Autobianchi A111) or even a Fiat Ritmo-derived model with AMC Pacer-like styling at the front.

          11. I have a hard time envisioning an AMC-Fiat or AMC-Citroën alliance (pun intended) that turned out any better, or even that differently, from the actual AMC-Renault one.

          12. With Citroen given its issues probably by the mid-1970s, most probably.

            Though an AMC-Fiat alliance is pretty compelling yet cannot see AMC building a model any smaller than a Ritmo/Delta-derived car, additionally such an alliance might be more successful as there would be no equivalent assassination as was the case with Renault’s Georges Besse (though Fiat’s relations with the left had its ups and downs).

            Packard would be AMC’s flagship with a V12 derived from the Fiat 130 V6 along with enlarged Fiat 130-derived platform, Jeep meanwhile would benefit from Fiat developed diesel engines.

            Below the Packards. AMC’s range would consist of a Maserati Quattroporte II-derived V8-powered FWD saloon (with optional 4WD) in the Ambassador segment, a Citroen CX/Lancia Gamma-derived V6-powered FWD saloon (with optional 4WD) in the Matador segment followed by a Lancia Beta-derived 4-cylinder / V6 powered FWD model (with optional 4WD) in the Hornet segment and Ritmo/Delta-derived (or upscaled Fiat 128-based Fiat 131-sized model) 4-cylinder FWD model (with optional 4WD) in the Gremlin segment.

            The Beta-derived model and even the larger CX/Gamma-derived model could potentially form the basis of V6/V8-powered mid-engined sportscars like the Montecarlo with RWD or 4WD.

  21. Your knowledge on this is impressive and a very good read, much more informative and than the “Less than they promised” documentary. My Grandfather CM MacMillan, spoke fondly of Egbert mentioning his movie star charisma that he brought from day one. However, he did mention that towards the end of his run that he pretty much had a nervous breakdown and left the company leaderless and in shambles during the bankruptcy. What do you know about this period and what came of Egbert after Studebaker?

    1. I don’t doubt that running Studebaker wore on Egbert’s nerves, but his eventual collapse was not due to a nervous breakdown: As it says in the text, he had stomach cancer, and actually spent a fair bit of his final year as Studebaker-Packard president on sick leave. This was in no way a secret; a June 1963 Car Life feature (probably written around February of that year) said Egbert had recently had three abdominal surgeries and described him as “gaunt,” which is a disturbing adjective for a 42-year-old man who had often been noted for his robust physique. Egbert kept working for a while longer, but he finally resigned due to ill health right before Thanksgiving 1963.

      To the extent that his illness left the company rudderless, I think it was largely because the Studebaker-Packard board had been ready to abandon the auto business even before Egbert became president. A lot of the board felt, and continued to feel during and after Egbert’s tenure, that building cars was a losing game and the corporation would be better off using those resources to continue diversifying into other industries. Egbert was by no means opposed to diversification, but he had argued that it would be possible to return the automotive division to profitability even if Studebaker remained a niche player with a market share as low as 2 percent. While Studebaker never made it back to even that modest level, it was a plausible goal — much more so than the plans that had been floated around the time of the Studebaker-Packard merger, which would have required a massive capital investment that Studebaker-Packard was never able to afford — and Egbert was a bright, energetic go-getter with an obvious talent for motivating people, so the board was willing to go along for a while, at least so long as Egbert was there as a cheerleader.

      Once he got sick, it’s not hard to surmise what happened: The naysayers on the board undoubtedly pointed out that the auto division still wasn’t profitable, the man who’d been telling them that it could be was on his way out, and Egbert had no obvious successor (at least not one with the same verve and charisma). If the auto business had been making money by then, there might have been a little more enthusiasm for staying the course, but as it was, the board members agreed that it was time to finally stop throwing good money after bad. The board voted to shut down the South Bend plant only 17 days after Egbert’s formal resignation.

      As for Egbert himself, he moved back to Los Angeles (not far from me, according to his obituary). He worked as a corporate consultant for a few years, presumably trying to take it easier, but it wasn’t enough. He died of cancer in 1969, not yet 50 years old. If he hadn’t gotten sick, or if he had recovered, he probably would have had a successful career for at least another 15 years.

  22. Regarding Studebaker-Packard distributing Mercedes-Benz–what was in it for Daimler-Benz?

    1. Several things. Daimler-Benz senior management wanted a bigger U.S. dealer network. The postwar U.S. was a very intimidating market: It was vast, it was diverse, and it was pretty well matured by the mid-fifties, which made it hard for a new player, especially a foreign-managed company unfamiliar with the market’s ticks and cultural foibles, to get a foothold. That was presumably why Daimler-Benz had gotten into business with Max Hoffman, but they were soon pretty eager to be rid of him. He wasn’t going to help them build any kind of volume, and they were none too happy with his approach to after-sales service. Additionally, Carl Giese, the head of international operations until early 1958, really wanted to build an alliance with Curtiss-Wright, and the relationship between Curtiss-Wright and Studebaker-Packard seemed like a useful stepping stone.

      Despite Studebaker-Packard’s problems, which were much-publicized, they had 2,500 established dealers, so many that if most of those dealers signed up to sell even one or two Mercedes-Benz cars a month, Daimler-Benz could easily increase their U.S. volume by an order of magnitude over what Hoffman was selling. It didn’t work out that way, but it seemed at the outset that if things went even moderately well, there would be a lot of upside for Daimler-Benz.

      1. A story on Max Hoffman would be quite a read. He was a very, uh, “interesting” individual to say the least.

      2. In your history of the BMW E24 6 series, you mention that BMW ended their U.S. distribution deal with Max Hoffman because BMW was seeing very little of the money. According to Hoffman’s Wikipedia page, he was U.S. distributor for a number of marques, including Mercedes, BMW, Porsche, Jaguar, and Alfa-Romeo–until he wasn’t.

        1. Hoffman was, from an automotive marketing standpoint, something of a dilettante. If a European automaker with no U.S. presence wanted to sell a few cars in the U.S., generally at upscale prices to an upscale clientele, Hoffman was apparently an easy starting point. (Getting out of that deal was sometimes another matter, as Daimler-Benz discovered.) When it came to building an American organization and reputation, with good after-sales service and warranty repair, his organization left a lot to be desired, and automakers who had bigger ambitions came to realize that Hoffman had definite limits.

  23. The Studebaker/Mercedes Benz alliance worked out very well for our local Studebaker-Packard dealer, Gulf Stream Motors in West Palm Beach, Florida. As I understand, taking on a Mercedes Benz franchise was optional for a Studebaker-Packard dealer, and for a minimal investment. Gulf Stream Motors took on the franchise. After both Packard and then Studebaker discontinued production, Mercedes Benz sales began to ramp up for Gulf Stream Motors particularly in light of it’s proximity to Palm Beach, and they ended up becoming one of the highest volume Mercedes Benz dealers in the country. Gulf Stream Motors is now Mercedes Benz of Palm Beach, a highly successful and profitable Mercedes Benz dealership.

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