Our love for the short lived and even shorter produced Bill Thomas Cheetah race car is pretty well known. It was a bit of a back door project that Chevrolet was helping to fund in order to come up with something to compete with the Shelby Cobras that were dominating road racing at home and abroad in the mid 1960s. Thomas produced a few cars and the remainder were destroyed in a massive fire at his shop. According to the seller, the first two Cheetahs that Thomas produced were aluminum and he then decided to make the rest out of fiberglass. Two companies produced a test body of Thomas and he chose the other guys, so Fiberglass Trends decided to produce their car and call it the GTR. It is exactly like a Cheetah in all intents and purposes. It seems that the Fiberglass Trends guys concentrated their efforts on getting drag racers to run the cars as they offered these cars with tube frames designed to hit the strip. (The tube frame had an list option price of $650!)
The eBay seller is unloading a treasure trove of stuff including one complete body, one complete body with its original chassis, the molds to make more reproduction bodies, and two “street” frames for the cars which are apparently not made of steel tube like the one in the photos. This is amazing stuff because the only things we have ever seen about the drag race Cheetahs are moldy old photos of the cars on trailers or launching at the strip. The fact that one can be bought right now having never been assembled and still sitting with its original frame unmolested is amazing. The car was painted (judging by the style of the paint) in the 1970s some time but the rest of it appears to have never been messed with.
The seller is looking for $41,000 for the entire lot of stuff which we think is incredible, especially if you consider the fact that the buyer gets the molds and could either resell or go into business popping out bodies. Drag Cheetahs are the bomb-diggity and we want one bad…especially an original one like this!
SCROLL DOWN TO SEE MORE PHOTOS AND THE EBAY AD LINK FOR THIS AMAZING FIND!
EBAY AD: 1965 CHEETAH – FIBERGLASS TRENDS – ORIGINAL BODY AND FRAME – DRAG CHEETAH PERFECTION
This would be the find of a lifetime if I opened a long locked garage someplace!
Never was a Kit Car Fan but this is not a Kit Car in that aspect.
So I would love to have something like this to play around with!
Man I hope those molds go to a good home and get reproduced. I would love to see Cheetah drag cars showing up at tracks around the country. I can’t believe all those Cheetahs are only three hours north of me. Now if I only had 41 grand. Way cool stuff!