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On an oval test track outside South Bend, Ind., a red-and-cream Studebaker hard top whisked along the straightaway. It swept into a steeply banked curve, worked up to the outer edge and hung there as it rounded the turn with hardly any slackening of speed. Then, like a dive bomber peeling off for attack, it whipped out of the turn and shot into the straightaway again. Around & around the three-mile track the car whirled, hour after hour. Average speed for eight hours: 75 m.p.h.
After the speed tests came the stability tests; at high speed, the test driver twisted the wheel hard left. The tires squealed as the car rocked far over and skidded around. Then came scores of other tests. The car was sent hurtling around right-angle turns, driven over cunningly contrived bumps that jarred the teeth of the driver (and would have thrown a less-skilled man into the ditch). It was sent splashing through a shallow tank of water. For six months the car was driven, in well-shrouded secrecy, until it had piled up more than 100,000 miles. Not till then did Studebaker Corp. engineers feel that they had worked all the bugs out of its 1953 car.
Secret Out. This week, in showrooms across the nation, it went on display. Long, low and racy, the new model is a completely new breed of car, radically different from anything ever mass-produced in the U.S. It combines the low-slung beauty, sporty look and most of the road-holding qualities of European sports cars with some of the comfort and most of the durability of the American family car.
The new Studebaker is the biggest design gamble in the auto industry since Chrysler's Airflow (which was a flop), a test to see whether Americans will buy a semi-sports car in big quantities. In its gamble, Studebaker staked $27 million for new tools, sure that the growing interest in sports cars indicates an entirely new trend in U.S. auto design. From Belgium's annual auto show in Brussels, where the car was first publicly shown last week, came the first evidence that the bet might pay off. Alongside the fanciest cars of Europe and 20 U.S. makes, the Studebaker was the sensation of the show. "Revolutionary," "spectacular," "beautiful," reported the press. Said Roger Darteyre, auto reporter of Le Soir, Belgium's largest daily, and technical expert for the Belgian Royal Automobile Club: "The Studebaker is the best thing America has done in low suspension ... So far as construction and design are concerned, it's the foremost achievement among American cars."
Studebaker's Chairman and President Harold Sines Vance, whose conservative clothes and serious mien make him seem as out of place in a sports car as a minister on a merry-go-round, was quietly confident this week that his new car would be just as much of a sensation in the U.S. Said he: "We expect to sell at least 150,000 more cars this year than last, the greatest number in our history, and boost our total share of the market from 4 to 6%."