Some 1,350 miles of driving with a Studebaker Golden Hawk in your rear view mirror on your trailer can stimulate inquiring minds to ask why Studebaker Golden Hawks enjoy the icon status they do. 
Such was a reflection while towing George Krem's "new" 1958 Golden Hawk back from Connecticut last week. [8D][:I] Here's the reflection: Studebaker Golden Hawks are icons because the label was never emasculated to a trim package or a lower-performance car. During three years of production, the first Golden Hawk and the last, and every single one in between, shared a common denominator: They were absolutely the highest-performance Studebaker you could buy...and every one of them was genuinely high-performance, with no "buts."
Compare that with other performance-image cars. See if you can come up with another that was not watered-down to something lesser toward the end, to draw people to the marque when, in fact, the qualities were gone that had originally endeared enthusiasts to the label. (Admittedly, there may be: I don't profess to have explored this theory for days on end.)
Examples of this postulation abound. To wit:
The smallest engine available in the original Impala Super Sport (1961) was a robust 348...but only the next year, you could get an Impala Super Sport with a SIX, for Pete's sake. [xx(]
Every Plymouth Road Runner was a notoriously fast, kick-butt car for the first several years, but they got watered down to stripes and a 318 (if you so ordered it) by 1974. [:0]
Ford put the word "Cobra" on just about everything except rolls of corporate toilet paper toward the end. [V]
Even the ultra-masculine 1955 Chrysler 300 got neutered to a deluxe Newport by 1962 (non-letter series, of course; but they were playing off the "300" image).
The original Rambler Rebel, with the new AMC 327 V-8, was arguably the fastest 1957 US-production car...but by 1968, the Rebel 550 Six was the cheapest, lowest-performance full-size AMC car you could buy.
(Newbies: The AMC 327 was no more a Chevy engine than the Studebaker 289 was a Ford.) And of course, you have to be a real GM groupie to appreciate the 1974 Pontiac GTO...not to mention the current iteration.
Thank goodness none of that ever happened to the Golden Hawk. That fact, plus the relatively low production numbers over a short three-year run, have sustained the Golden Hawk's deserved image among even non-Studebaker enthusiasts.
Studebaker marketing may have fallen into that situation by default, but it's a good thing they did!
BP
We've got to quit saying, 
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