My wonderful 1963 Studebaker Avanti. Unfortunately she and I had a run-in with a corner that we didn't round very well and met a barbed wire fence back on 10/6/97. Luckily for me the car did its job and absorbed the impact harming me in no manner except my pride and joy of driving her. I expect this car to hit the Bay Area streets again in 2000 sometime, and even then not as much as she used to. I must find a fun daily driver that I can hack- n-slash so I can corner better than an American muscle car was intended to do. Built on July 5th in 1962 this is the twenty-fifth Avanti built and the first built on that day (twenty-four Avanti's being built on "The 4th"leaves very little math to complete). Originally built as an R-2 this car was sent to Paxton Products in Santa Monica for some extensive workings to the engine and driveline components.  Avanti R-2's came out of the factory as blown Studebaker 289 V-8's.   The president of Studebaker (Sherwood Egbert) was the first registered owner of this particular Avanti and was the one who had her sent to Paxton. The heads on this car are the only two known to exist of their type. While she was in Paxton's possession the engine was supposed to be bored to 304 cubic inches, but for whatever reason, we don't show that as being done. When the rebuild/restoration is done, you can bet we will be finishing what Paxton started and give her the additional cubic inches she needs. My dad has a saying that sums it up "The best thing this car does is turn octane into decibels. " This Avanti (as do most older cars) prefer gas that has a higher octane rating than we have publicly available today, so now if I want to extract every last bit of performance when the restoration is finished, I have a few options. Design the engine with 92 octane in mind, run aviation fuel, add octane booster or fill up at any local racetrack. With a supercharged five liter, glasspacks and fairly good size exhaust tips coming out of the back as factory equipment, you'd better believe she's a noisy one. You can hear it when I'm done with all my website additions (I have a mini tape of some glorious muscle car tunes yet to be converted to .wav format). This car has never been dyno tested but apparently is upwards of 400 gross horsepower. A beefy Studebaker 3 speed automatic transmission and customized "twin traction" (Studebaker's terminology for posi) Dana 44 with 3.73:1 rear gears help supply those horses to the road. This picture was taken in 1992 at a show in Seattle in which it placed first in its class. I could write a book about this car, but I'll let you just email (geoff@crall.com) me if you've got any questions to learn more about this wonderful car.