Copper Wink

When Kicker Audio decide to build a showcase for their latest speakers, they don’t mess about. This 1950 Studebaker is testament to the passion of a bunch of enthusiasts who didn’t want to just screw some speakers into yet another minivan…

- Daniel Bevis

The concept of the Cyclops is one of the more tricky-to grasp ideas from Greek mythology. Sure, okay, there were a lot of mad creatures running about the place and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t accept a race of primordial giants with a single eye in the centre of their foreheads, it’s no more or less bonkers than, say, the troops of a besieged city not immediately seeing through the ‘generosity’ of being gifted a colossal wooden horse and just gamely wheeling it in through the gates. No, the real problem with the Cyclops is that paintings of them show humanoid faces which have the bone structure to accommodate two eyes, and yet we’re to believe they’ve inexplicably evolved backwards to develop a vision scope that has no depth perception. I mean, come on.

Nevertheless, it’s this peculiar aesthetic that Studebaker called upon when starting up their Champion model back in 1950, and you have to agree that it works. That central eye (which is a grille, rather than a headlight) certainly gives it character.

The 1950 Champion is an unusual creation anyway, with or without the Cyclops eye; the post-war third-gen model was available as a four-door saloon, station wagon or convertible, but Studebaker also saw fit to hand the crayons over to Raymond Loewy Associates so that celebrated designer Virgil Exner could have a go at reimagining the car as a rakish two-door coupé. What emerged, the Champion Starlight Coupé, wowed the public with a widescreen wraparound rear window, that iconic Cyclops styling, and a bootlid so comically long that contemporary wags remarked that they couldn’t tell which way it was supposed to be going. But this unique styling made the Champion Starlight look super-futuristic – no-one ever shook up the establishment by playing it safe.