The Weirdest Cars In Studebaker’s Basement: The Porsche-Engined Lark

I’m here in South Bend, Indiana to see and drive what is supposed to be the first hybrid motorhome, at least if that talking horse that appeared to me in a dream is telling the truth. Even if he wasn’t, that’s ok, because South Bend is also the ancestral home of defunct carmaker Studebaker, and there’s a Studebaker museum here with a basement full of interesting stuff. I got pictures of a lot of the interesting bits, so let’s look at one of them now, why not?

In some ways, I feel like this may be the most infamous car down in the basement, but it’s also one of the more confusing ones. I think, among hardcore car geeks, there’s some vague knowledge that Porsche and Studebaker once worked together back in the 1950s to come up with some interesting smaller cars for the American market, cars that had some hallmarks of Porsche engineering, like rear-engines and air-cooling, but also American styling influences.

And, of course, that did happen, with the first four-door car that Porsche built being part of this project. The whole thing is absolutely fascinating, and while nothing ever really came of it, a few fascinating cars were built, including the handsome Porsche Type 542 that had a rear-mounted 120° V6 with concurrent air- and water-cooling (air-cooled heads, water-cooled cylinders, it’s weird). It looked like this:

I especially like the detail of the turn indicators forming the upper shape of those bumper guards. It’s a nice-looking machine, and does seem to have both Porsche and Studebaker design influences. It’s also a bigger story I don’t want to get into just yet, but we’ll come back to it.

Anyway, based on this, you’d be likely to think that the first car I saw in the basement, a 1959 Studebaker Lark with a rear-mounted air-cooled flat-four from a Porsche 356, would be part of this whole Studebaker-Porsche project. Incredibly, it’s not!

What the hell? There was another Porsche-Studebaker cross-pollination project going on? Well, yeah, there was, sort of. Curtiss-Wright, the aircraft manufacturer, was actually who built this, and it was built without participation from either Porsche or Studebaker.

You see, Curtiss-Wright got a license to built NSU Wankel rotary engines, which they planned on using in aircraft. It seems someone at Curtiss-Wright also realized that these Wankel engines might have a good automotive application, and so decided to mock up something that could possibly use it. Of course, nobody was really building cars with rotaries back then, with NSU’s first wankel-powered car, the NSU Wankel Spider, not appearing until 1963. It was a rear-engine design, so it seems NSU’s development of rotary cars at that time was focused on rear engines, which they were already familiar with from their NSU Prinz cars.

Now, I’m not sure why whomever at Curtiss-Wright just didn’t grab a Volkswagen or even an NSU Prinz or something that was already rear-engined, but they didn’t, instead taking a 1959 Lark and going through a lot of effort to re-locate the drivetrain to the rear. I’m told the fuel tank and spare and battery were moved up front into a nice trunk area (I couldn’t see it from the location the car is stuck in the museum) and the work done to mount the 1953 Porsche 356 engine looks pretty clean and well done at the rear.

There’s plenty of room in that trunk for that little 70 hp flat-four, with its big twin carbs and distinctive orange oil filter, and I bet the battery could have been stuck back there, like VW did with the Karmann-Ghia and the Type 2 bus. The floor on the inside, freed from the burden of a driveshaft, is flat, too.

It’s all very weird; this isn’t the engine that Curtiss-Wright was planning to use, but the car sort of makes sense, as Curtiss-Wright bailed out Studebaker-Packard in 1956 and ended up owning a big chunk of their stock, so maybe they were tentatively testing some future options for a new line of rear-engined Wankel Larks?

Also, why are the corners of the windows painted over, or replaced with sheet metal?

No one seems to be entirely sure what the plan was for this thing or exactly why it was originally built, or, well, anything, really. It was sold as a regular used car before being acquired by the museum, making me wonder if someone actually drove this strange thing around, like a normal daily driver? It’s fascinating, and if you’re in South Bend, go to the Studebaker Museum’s basement and you can wonder about it, right next to it, yourself.