"Blue Collar Blueprint"

This 1962 Studebaker Champ is finished in Riviera Blue with a repaint done in the 1980s, light grey bumpers, a chrome grille, a grey bed cover, and a blue leather bench seat inside. Under the hood is the 289 cubic inch V8 backed by a three-speed manual with overdrive, the strongest and most usable drivetrain combination the Champ was offered with. The 289 was known among Studebaker owners for producing strong low-end torque and the kind of durability that kept these trucks running long past what the brand’s financial situation might have suggested was possible.

Studebaker could not afford to design an entirely new truck cab as the 1960s arrived, so engineers grafted the front end of the Lark compact car onto a truck chassis and the result looked every bit as modern and competitive as pickups from Ford, Chevrolet, and Chrysler at a lower price point. It was the kind of creative engineering that only a company fighting for survival produces, and the end result was a truck with a car-based cab feel, a Lark dashboard inside, and a surprisingly refined driving character for something assembled under a $900,000 development budget. 1962 was the highest production year of the Champ’s entire run with 7,325 units built, and Studebaker would close its South Bend factory just two years later, making every Champ a finite piece of American truck history from a brand that no longer exists.

The interior is clean with the blue leather bench in good shape and the cabin carrying the car-like feel of the Lark-based design throughout. The grey bed cover keeps the cargo area protected, and the grey bumpers and chrome grille give the exterior a clean, well-matched look. The overdrive in the transmission is a genuine daily driving advantage that makes this truck comfortable at highway speeds in a way that most trucks of this era simply were not.

The Studebaker Champ is one of the more overlooked and undervalued trucks in the early 1960s collector market. Buyers who find one in a clean, driving condition with the V8 and overdrive manual tend not to let them go easily, and this one is exactly that kind of truck.

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