Do any of you remember the homebuilt “specials’ that tore around the tracks during the early
days of road racing in the U.S.A.?  Many a time, an inspired mechanic/racer would fashion a
race car out of a scrounged-up frame, a salvaged engine and gearbox (too many times from an
unfortunate Corvette), and bodywork that was “massaged” to barely fit over everything. And, if
he was lucky, that homebuilt “special” would be competitive in the Modified classes that SCCA
ran back then, if not running up front and winning.

One legendary Chevy-powered road racer started out like many of those “specials,” but by the
time the first one rolled out of its creator’s garage, it was the ‘60s—a time when “backdoor”
technical assistance was available from Chevrolet Engineering.

That car was the Cheetah, created by Bill Thomas, in the wake of the in-house work by Chevrolet
Engineering to make a Cobra-killing Vette, namely the Corvette Grand Sport, a factory Vette Rod
if ever there was one!

As Don Francisco wrote about it in the March, 1964 issue of our future-brother-in-law-book, HOT ROD Magazine, “Cheetah is a combination of proven Chevrolet powertrain components with a
special frame, front suspension, and body assembly built in Thomas’ shop.” That proven
powertrain was based on the 327-inch smallblock V8, teamed with a Borg-Warner T-10 four-speed. (Sound familiar?) Francisco continued, “Cheetah’s design is such that its frame is its
load-carrying member. Its body, which for the prototype car is aluminum, but for production
models will be fiberglass, doesn’t add any structural strength of the car.”

That frame was made of one-inch-diameter, .125-inch wall thickness, 4130 chromemoly tubing,
while the suspension consisted of coil-overs on each corner, with a Corvette-type differential
in back.

All told, when all put together, the Cheetah weighed in at around 1500 pounds. That’s about
three hundred or so pounds lighter than the 1800-pound weight target Chevy engineers set for
the Gran Sport, and about half (if that) what a production Sting Ray coupe weighed back then.

Francisco mentioned that Thomas planned a production run to build enough cars (100) to make it
Grand Touring-class legal, with prices ranging from $7,500 for a “Street” model, to around
$12,500 for a full-on competition version. This was when you could buy two Sting Ray coupes,
each optioned with F40, G81, J56, K66, L84, M20 and N11 for that twelve-five, and get almost a grand in change!

Unfortunately, no good deed went unpunished back then. GM’s upper management squelched Chevy’s back-door tech assistance to Bill Thomas’ Cheetah program, and his Anaheim, California shop suffered a major fire, thus trashing his production tooling after only 23 cars were built. But those 23 Cheetahs made an impression on anyone who saw them, either from the distance of the printed page, or up close on the track. Especially those who saw it hit 185 mph at Road America

at Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin—or 215 mph at Daytona!

But that fire wasn’t the last chapter in the Cheetah story. Yes, dear friends, there’s a
Cheetah Continuation Collectible that’s not a clone of the original, but a
pick-up-from-where-we-left-off-with-#24 continuation of the original line, authorized by Bill
Thomas himself.

On the Web, you’ll find more information about it at www.65cheetahccc.com.

Would it be a car you could drive to work? Maybe…but only if your commute route has a nice
smooth surface with a nice set of twisties in it, along with no cellphone-yacking idiots in
front or behind you. You’d also need to have neighbors at home or work who wouldn’t mind the
sound waves coming from the unmuffled high-output smallblock shaking their windows twice a day.

And you’d also need understanding members of your local law-enforcement community, especially
the patrol officers assigned to that route, their chain-of-command, the county
prosecutor/district attorney, and possibly trial court, appellate court and state supreme court
judges.

They might be more understanding if you drove a Cheetah Continuation Collectible in
vintage-racing events, especially ones like the Rolex Monterey Historics, whose spectator
turnout generates plenty of sales-tax revenues that help keep the lights on at the courthouse
(and the cells locked at the jail).