Design
The Avanti was developed at the direction of Studebaker president, Sherwood Egbert, who took over in February 1961.[14][15] The car's design theme was "allegedly doodled by Egbert on the proverbial back of an envelope during an airplane flight."[16] Egbert's 'doodle' was to answer Ford's Thunderbird and an attempt to improve the automaker's sagging performance.[17]
Designed by Raymond Loewy's team, comprising Tom Kellogg, Bob Andrews, and John Ebstein, on a 40-day crash program, the Avanti featured a radical fiberglass body mounted on a modified Studebaker Lark 109-inch convertible chassis and powered by a modified 289 Hawk V8 engine. A Paxton supercharger was offered as an option.[18]
In eight days, the stylists finished a "clay scale model with two different sides: one a two-place sports car, the other a four-seat GT coupe."[19] Tom Kellogg, a young California stylist hired for this project by Loewy, "felt it should be a four-seat coupe."[19] "Loewy envisioned a low-slung, long-hood–short-deck semi-fastback coupe with a grilleless nose and a wasp-waisted curvature to the rear fenders, suggesting a supersonic aircraft."[20]
The Avanti's complex body shape "would have been both challenging and prohibitively expensive to build in steel"[20] with Studebaker electing to mold the exterior panels in glass-reinforced plastic (fiberglass), outsourcing the work to Molded Fiberglass Body in Ashtabula, Ohio — the same company that built the fiberglass panels for the Chevrolet Corvette in 1953.[21]
The Avanti featured disc brakes in the front that were British Dunlop-designed units, made under license by Bendix, "the first American production model to offer them."[22] The Avanti was one of the first bottom breather designs, where air enters from under the front of the vehicle rather than via a conventional grille above the front bumper. This design feature became much more common after the 1980s.
