Ian Fleming with his 1963 Avanti
Secret Agent 007 drives Bentleys and Aston Martins in the James Bond spy thrillers. Bond creator and author Ian Fleming was an avid car fan and chose something a little more unusual for the British countryside. He liked to drive early 1960s Ford Thunderbirds and then traded one of those for his 1963 Studebaker Avanti which he regarded as “an infinitely higher class of machine.” Fleming even visited the Studebaker factory in South Bend, Indiana to order his car, a 1963 R2 with an automatic. He wanted the car finished in black which was not a standard color at that time. The black color required some extra coats of paint. It was still a while til Studebaker offered black as an optional color for Avantis.
Ian Fleming was born in London in 1908. He was educated at Eton College and then abroad in Germany and Austria. After starting his career at Reuters news agency he moved on to became a stockbroker. During World War II he worked as an assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence and was privy to many secrets. It was this experience that was to provide some of the characters and many incidents that he would later write about in the James Bond novels.
Following the war he became the foreign manager and was in charge of foreign correspondents for Kemsley newspapers. His creative imagination remained hidden until 1952. It was then, at the age of 43, he settled down in his house in Jamaica, and wrote Casino Royale, the first 007 adventure. He finished the book in just over two months. He wrote another thirteen James Bond novels and lived to witness their enormous success. He got to see his character brought to life by Sean Connery in the first two Bond films, Dr No and From Russia with Love.
While convalescing from his first heart attack in 1962, he wrote a short story about a flying car for his son Caspar. The book was titled Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Ian Fleming died in 1964 at 56 years old.
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was based on a series of real cars built by race driver Count Louis Zborowski in the early 1920s. Obviously the movie version of the car had a few options the real cars did not since it could fly and float.
On cars Fleming commented during a 1964 interview with Playboy magazine. “I like a car I can leave out in the street all night and which will start at once in the morning and still go a hundred miles an hour when you want it to and yet give a fairly comfortable ride. I can’t be bothered with a car that needs tuning, or one that will give me a lot of trouble and expenditure.” “The Studebaker supercharged Avanti is the same thing. It will start as soon as you get out in the morning; it has a very nice, sexy exhaust note and will do well over a hundred and has got really tremendous acceleration and much better, tighter road holding and steering than the Thunderbird. Excellent disc brakes, too. I’ve cut a good deal of time off the run between London and Sandwich in the Avanti, on braking and power alone.”
Some other famous Avanti owners were Ricky Nelson, Alice Cooper, singer Shirley Bassey, Johnny Carson Richard Carpenter, Dick Van Dyke, Rod Serling, Michael Landon, Frank SInatra, Sandy Koufax and DeForest Kelly.
