A few months ago we ran a Prime Find which featured an Avanti – not an actual Studebaker, true, since they only manufactured Avanti’s for eighteen short months between June 1962 and December the following year, and this was a 1981 car. But nevertheless an Avanti. In that piece we mentioned the original car’s high-speed exploits on the world-renowned Bonneville Salt Flats. Today, we’ll dig deeper and take a closer look into the connection between the Avanti and one of motor racing’s most colourful, most-loved – and not forgetting most successful – personalities, Andy Granatelli, and a product whose initials are known to every motorsports enthusiast of a certain age, STP.
Studebaker had been struggling to compete with the big US car companies and in many respects the Avanti was their final throw of the dice. The aim was to produce a car that was going to be advanced, fast, and practical and that would transform the company’s fortunes. The history behind its now-legendary design by a team led by Raymond Loewy has already been covered, and as things turned out, it proved to be too advanced, too different, for the average American motorist.
Nevertheless, the company had big ambitions for its “halo” car, and in trying to prove its credibility as a properly fast car, took this project very seriously. To start with, they used an engine that only found its way into nine Avanti’s – this was a supercharged 304.5cu in engine which produced some 400bhp. Then, to help things further, Studebaker enlisted the help of no less than Anthony “Andy” Granatelli, who by this time had already established himself not only as a leading racing driver, but also as a team owner/manager. He just happened to also be the owner of the company which produced the supercharger used on the Avanti…
Born in 1923, the backdrop to Granatelli’s younger years was framed by the Great Depression of the 1930’s, with he and his family resorting to all kinds of ways to keep the wolf from the door – collecting returnable coke bottles, car valeting, or delivering groceries.
He and his brothers Joe and Vince were car nuts, and each learned mechanical and engineering skills that eventually led them to hot-rodding and dirt track racing. But their careers really took off when they began race promoting, and it was during this period that the brothers made names and serious money for themselves. Their events attracted huge crowds and the Granatelli name became more and more well known.
In the US at that time – perhaps even today – all races and circuits eventually led to America’s flagship motorsports event – the Indianapolis 500. After debuting at the oval circuit known as The Brickyard in 1946 with their own car, the “Grancor Special” – a Miller Ford bought from a museum and made race ready – two years later Andy Granatelli took the wheel himself and made an immediate impact, recording an average lap speed around the oval of 129.618mph, one of the fastest laps ever at Indianapolis at that time. Unfortunately, he made a different kind of impact in the race itself, into the circuit’s unforgiving wall, cuased by a tyre blow-out, but unlike the car, Granatelli lived to fight another day, although he had to wait another few years to be part of an Indy 500 race-winning team.
While all this was going on, Granatelli was also building a hugely successful career as a seller of tuning and speed equipment, something he pioneered, to the point where he and his brothers could effectively retire from motorsport and indeed business in 1956. However, retirement did not sit well and by 1958 Granatelli was back in the thick of it, with the acquisition of loss-making Paxton, a manufacturer of various motoring-related products but most significantly, Paxton superchargers. It’s from here where the direction of travel started to head in the direction of the Avanti.
There were problems with the superchargers, but Granatelli took it upon himself to resolve these issues. In typical Granatelli style, he did so to the point where he and his brothers got back into “the speed business”, setting records on Bonneville’s famous salt flats as well as Daytona Beach’s hard sand speed course, where in a Chrysler 300 equipped with not one, but two Paxton superchargers, he set a record average speed of 172.166mph. Indeed, over his career, Granatelli set literally hundreds of speed and endurance records, many of them in the Studebaker Avanti, which we’ll come to shortly.
After this, Granatelli’s star rose ever higher, as he was courted by Chrysler to feature in their TV advertising, making him a public figure beyond motorsport, and before long, Studebaker came calling. In fact, in a gamble designed to help save the troubled company, they bought Paxton and the Granatelli brothers as a package and the brothers were now corporate employees.
Andy Granatelli’s first job for his new bosses was to work on Studebaker’s newest car – and Raymond Loewy’s most famous, if perhaps not his loveliest creation – the Avanti. The challenge was simple – make a 289cu in (4.7-litre) engine perform like a 400cu in (6.5-litre). The solution – the Paxton Model SN supercharger (designed by Granatelli himself) and at the suggestion of engineer Ed Winfield, with added STP – a Studebaker product whose initials stood for Scientifically Treated Petroleum. This eventually led to a decade-long connection between Granatelli and STP, more on which later.
Before taking on this challenge, Granatelli was persuaded by Sherwood Egbert, President of Studebaker, to take on the role of President of the company’s Chemical Compounds Division, whose main product was… STP. Originally created by German scientists during WW2, the abbreviation stood for Scientifically Treated Petroleum, though Studebaker sometimes referred to it as Studebaker Tested Products in some of their advertising. Over the coming years the names STP and Andy Granatelli were to become inextricably linked.
Granatelli and his team spent several months in 1962 and ’63 testing not just the Avanti, but also the Studebaker Hawk and Lark, but it was in the Avanti in particular – driven by Granatelli and Paula Murphy (who became known as the First Lady of Speed) – that all manner of speed records were set in one ten-day spell, 370 of them! Murphy, then just 28 years old, became the world’s fastest woman in a production car, achieving speeds in excess of 160mph, and Granatelli himself piloted the same Avanti to an average two-run speed of 170.75mph, which at the time made it the world’s fastest production car, though with that supercharged R-3 engine, it was of course some way from being a regular Avanti.
Unfortunately, all of this wasn’t enough for the Avanti to survive beyond December 1963, with Studebaker ending car manufacture completely in 1966 after closing its Hamilton, Ontario plant. The name disappeared completely in 1979, although there has been a – so far unsuccessful – attempt to revive it in recent years.
Despite Studebaker’s demise as a car manufacturer, Granatelli continued to run STP and over the next few years became known as much for his publicity for the brand as he had been for his racing, slapping red-orange (also described as day-glo red) oblong STP decals on anything and everything that stayed still long enough. Perhaps his crowning glory in this regard was his STP suit which made Granatelli an instantly recognisable – though perhaps not particularly stylish – and hugely popular figure at races throughout the US as he strode about the pit lane and garages. Especially at Indianapolis to where he was persuaded to return by a car that had apparently had its day – the Novi. Indeed, in 1964 his entire team crew were dressed in STP pyjamas…
In 1961 Granatelli and his brothers had bought what was left of the Novi project lock, stock and barrel, and returned to the track which had been a magnet for them back in the late 1940’s. They got the car to be competitive around the 2.5 mile oval again, but it still wasn’t enough, and that particular part of the Granatelli Indy story came to an end in 1966.
Sparked by a meeting with Colin Chapman back in 1963, the Granatellis started working with Lotus over the next few years, and it looked as if that long awaited Indy 500 win was finally to arrive in 1966, when it seemed the late and very great Jim Clark had delivered a victory for the team driving a Lotus 38 (the team had won the previous year’s race without the Granatellis, also in a Lotus 38). But confusion surrounding the lap counting led to the win being awarded to Englishman Graham Hill instead, much to the consternation of both Granatelli and Colin Chapman.
After two further heart-breaking near misses in ’67 and ’68, 1969 finally brought Granatelli and STP an Indy 500 win. Mario Andretti took the flag in first place, despite crashing heavily in practice in his original Lotus and resorting to his back-up car, a Ford-engined Brawner Hawk, the car in which he had actually finished in last place the year before – talk about a change of fortune! Andretti was rewarded with an exuberant hug and a kiss from the ever-restrained Andy Granatelli. This race also marked the end of Granatelli’s co-operation with Chapman and Lotus.
Thanks to Granatelli’s creativity and entrepreneurial drive – which besides his suit, team pyjamas and giving away many, many thousands of decals, encompassed entering eleven STP-sponsored cars in the 1968 500 even when he had no intention of running them all, but at $1,000 per entry, considered it cheap advertising – the STP logo and brand became one of motor racing’s most recognisable sights. Granatelli continued his work with the company after the demise of Studebaker, and in the year he won his first 500, the company was spun off as a separate entity, and under his stewardship, STP sales rose from $2m a year to $200m a year within only one decade.
STP’s claims to boost engine performance were not universally accepted, however – in fact, in 1971 it was claimed that STP was nothing more than “thick goo” which made no difference to an engine’s performance. Nevertheless, despite this setback, STP continued to be a major presence in motor racing. In 1972, a ground-breaking deal was reached to sponsor Richard Petty in NASCAR; the combined STP red-orange and “Petty Blue” became one of motorsports most famous colour schemes after the two partners compromised on whose colours they would race in.
Granatelli and STP also had a powerful presence in F1, with those famous initials and logo decorating Ronnie Petersen’s March 711 – what a driver he was! – and in 1973, Gordon Johncock gave Granatelli a second 500 win, driving for STP/ Patrick Racing in a rain-shortened race.
However, Granatelli’s time with STP came to an end the following year after a falling out with his paymasters at Studebaker. His ventures in motor-racing as a team entrant also ended, although he and his entourage remained regulars at race weekends around the country. He retired in 1986 as a very rich man when he sold TuneUp Masters, which had cost him $300,000 just ten years earlier, for $60,000,000 – not a bad return!
Even in retirement, Granatelli couldn’t stay away from the Brickyard – it’s believed he attended every Indy 500 from 1946 to 2012, the year before his death, aged 90. Andy Granatelli – engineer, race driver and promoter, speed record holder, marketeer, company CEO, successful entrepreneur, and family man. What a life he led, and what an impact he had!
I’m indebted to Michael Hodges at MPH Communications for the loan of Andy Granatelli’s autobiography “They Call Me Mister 500”, published in 1969; an entertaining ride through his life and career to that point but stops well before many more of his accomplishments in both motor racing and business, and for a number of the photographs used to illustrate this piece. If you are the owner of any of the other photos used, please contact us so we can credit you.