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Buying collector cars sight unseen

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‘Clunk, clunk, clunk’ was the sound of a shovel as it struck an unseen object deep in the dense tangle of blackberry bushes.

Maple Ridge excavating contractor Dale Pennock had come to the Langley farm east of Vancouver to look at a 1964 Studebaker Avanti restoration project that the owner had given up on and wanted to sell.

“You mean there’s more than one?” Dale inquired.

“There are two of them,” was the surprising response.

‘Clunk, clunk, clunk’ went the shovel again as it penetrated another enormous tangle of branches.

“There’s the other one,” the owner said.

He had purchased the rare pair of Studebaker’s legendary fibreglass-bodied Avanti personal luxury coupes in California and brought them north for a complex restoration on both.

With the best of intentions, he bought reproduction interiors for both cars and a bevy of new parts and pieces.

As time went on, he moved the cars to a friend’s farm where nature quickly took its course. The two classics became overgrown in giant tangles of blackberry bushes and disappeared from sight.

Dale bought the cars without seeing any part of them and came back with a chainsaw and other tools to cut back the bushes.

First a bumper was revealed, then a front end and then a windshield. He was amazed at the condition of the cars when they finally emerged. One was a fully optioned turquoise-on-turquoise example complete with air conditioning and the only tilt steering column that he had ever heard of installed in an Avanti. The body was in near perfect shape.

The other Avanti, a red one, had some cracks and crazing in the fibreglass but was otherwise a restorable car.

A flatbed car hauler was called in to do the job, dragging one car onto the deck and hooking the second Avanti behind.

Dale had big plans for the turquoise Avanti so he put the red car up for sale and sold it.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” he laments. “The turquoise car was all apart and I should have kept the other car to guide me in putting my car together.”

Being a pretty lucky guy, the person who bought the red car decided against restoring it and wanted to sell it back. Dale jumped at the chance.

Now completed and painted Corvette burnt orange with a black leather interior, Dale’s 1964 Avanti looks the way a next-generation Avanti should.

The Studebaker Avanti was a personal luxury coupe with daring rakish styling built by the Studebaker Corporation between June 1962 and December 1963.
Studebaker itself referred to the Avanti as “America’s only four passenger high performance personal car” in its sales literature.

It was developed by a team led by legendary designer Raymond Loewy, who produced final renderings in a matter of just 40 days.

The all-new Avanti featured a radical body design made from fibreglass mounted on a shortened Studebaker Lark convertible chassis and powered by a modified 289-cubic-inch Hawk engine.

An optional Paxton supercharger was available to significantly boost performance in a car capable of speeds up to 270 kilometres per hour.

Only 3,834 examples of the advance-design Avanti were built in the 1963 model year and just 809 were classified as 1964 models. The general rule is that the 1963 Avanti had round headlight surrounds and the 1964 model had square ones.

That makes Dale Pennock’s 1964 model a very rare car and his concept was to make improvements to the original design and add performance.

His modified version does not have a wraparound front bumper as the original car did. And he cleaned up the rear end by eliminating the unsightly bumps in the facade that originally hid the rear spring shackles.

Continuing to redefine the back space, Dale added modified split rear bumpers from a 1963 Corvette and dual exhaust exiting under the facade.

Beneath the hood is a 450-horsepower power plant salvaged from a Cadillac Escalade running through a four-speed automatic transmission.

“This is a very quick car and can smoke the tires in the first three gears,” he says of the blistering takeoff performance.

He appreciates the safety features including a built-in roll bar that went into the original design of this very advanced motoring masterpiece from more than half a century ago.

Dale’s car has come a long way from its blackberry bush tomb alongside the other 1964 Avanti that Dale has now resold to an enthusiast who is in the process of resurrecting it.

Alyn Edwards is a classic car enthusiast and partner in Peak Communicators, a Vancouver-based public relations company. aedwards@peakco.com


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