I don't think that Tonka ever made a Cheetah, although they made a generic steel-and-plastic sports roadster with similar proportions. I do recall that Tootsietoy made a small die-cast Cheetah, very rudimentary, just a body, axles and wheels (sort of consistent with the original, I'd say). I watched Jerry Titus drive the Cheetah in Cal Club competition a few times in the early/mid '60s. "Handful" is a perfect descriptor for the car.
I spent a lot of time working on this one. ( But that was a XP1, if I remember correctly ) It ran Bonneville in the A and AA Blown Modified Sporstcar Class. The owner of that Car figured it was faster in a staight line than the Bocar that fell down the side of Pikes Peak was in free fall... I dont know if that was true, but it was good bullshit to tell with a couple of beers...
Saw one or two run at Laguna Seca ( Montery, Calif.). Never did very well, but they sure had a "horny" look to them. It seems to me that the tranny tailshaft hooked directly to the vette(?) irs third member. I always thought that with that wide grill and no "venting" for air to exit, that top end would be somewhat restricted. A really neat footnote in auto history, methinks!!
From the HRM article: Wheelbase.............90" frt Tread width.......57-59" (adjustable) Length..................140" Height...................42" Width....................68" Belly Clearance.......5 1/2" Weight..................1510lbs Alum. body/fluids/no gas 47% to 53% bias empty - with a 170lb driver it was 43% to 57% frt/rr Two engines were available..a 327, and a 377 SBC. The 377 was a 327 with a 3.75 stroker crank. They were given the Thomas performance mods, and you had a choice of Rochester F.I. or Weber Carburators. Chevy 11" Passenger car brakes were used - 2 3/4 fronts and 2 1/2 rears. A Girling dual master cylinder assembly was used, and an equalizer bar allowed adjustment of bias front to rear, as well as safety, in allowing one system to work if the other went out. There was no drive shaft. A single universal joint coupled a Chevy truck yoke and the Corvette cross and bearing assy. Clutch was hydraulic Mutt
Back in about 1984 I was hot to find a Cheetah, and located a company down in Sebring, Florida, that sold an accurate body and chassis kit. They said the body was molded off a mold taken off an original car. They also made the frames and bodies for the ERA Cobra's. The literature was real cheap looking copies, and talking with the owner, they seemed like a 'hole in the wall' type company. But, the prices were very reasonable (for the Cobra, about 1/3 what ERA wanted at the time).
I really enjoyed this thread as I helped to build one of these back in 1968. My ex-bro-in-law bought a Cheetah body from the factory and mounted it on a cut down 1960 Ford frame. I remember how light and flexible that body was and as someone said ,you could see right thru it. The car had a Ford 390 with a 3speed and overdrive. We did a ton of work on that car(as you can guess) but we never finished it. In 1970 he loaded it on a homemade trailer and moved to Florida and sold it. I did drive it once around a parking lot (it never was road worthy ) and it probably would have made a good drag car but with that frame and suspension it never would have worked on a road course. I remember at the time the big problem was finding a windsheild that would fit and we never did. Thanks for the memories !!
AV8, I can't remember the source but it almost had to be a Petersen mag from about the time of the Cheetah intro. My memories are fuzzy, since this didn't seem germane to my flathead interests, but I'm pretty sure he did work on both the erarly Vette vertical plenum and the horizontal one used on the last couple years of fuelie Vettes. I remember the ads for the service and the blueprints--I believe Thomas was one of the first Chevy dealers to put out a catalog and ads for the hot rod parts market, a brilliant idea! I know I saw a magazine article showing an early plenum bandsawed open vertically right down the middle, messed with, and welded back together. He also marketed a dual air conversion to bring air flow up to snuff--I don't remember the details of this, as I was young and ignorant and only understood fragments of what he was doing and how the injector worked. The Cheetah drew about the same reaction as the Cobra did among people I knew--awesome, but on a different planet we couldn't imagine reaching! The 377 (same combo as a modern 383 stroker, but standard bore) was used by Chevy in a number of semi experimental uses, including aluminum ones in Grand Sport Vettes, I believe.
I'm pretty sure I still have one of the clear plastic vacuum formed slot car bodies that we used on the scratch built 1/24 slot cars back about 65-66 when it was a nation wide craze. The short tall body was terrible for slot racing but it looked so damn good I just cruised around profiling.
I don't care too much for the hardtop version... but that Bocar is flat out COOL! Where can I get one? Sam.
I had a Cheetah Slot car in the 60's. I thought it was the coolest looking sports racer from the 60's. The porportions remind me of a super stylized Lotus Super seven . Short rear Deck, short nose, great hp/lbs. chuck
Not too many Bodies floating around.. BOb CARnes made complete cars, and when he started selling seperate Bodies one of them got mounted on a Jeep 4X4 Chassis ( same Wheelbase ). That pissed him off, and he stopped selling seperate Bodies. A set of molds do exist, but the guy that ownes them is not interested in selling any Bodies. I have had many day dreams of trying to talk him into selling me just the front part of a Body, and making a Hand formed Aluminum Coupe ( similar to a Alfa TZ1 or a Ferrari GTO ) for the back...
I say we start bugging him. I never really thought of building a road race styled car... until I saw that today. Sam.
The predecessor to the Cheetah was Bad Bascom, a Chevy II that had much of the underpinnings of the Cheetah. This is the only Chevy II I have seen set up for GT racing. Anyone aware of the success it had? (or didn't have) I have a foggy recollection of it being used for drag racing instead of road racing. Mutt
There was another car that had a similar profile to the Cheetah, with a big engine and not much else. It's not as pretty as a Cheetah, in fact it has about as much charm and beauty as an English Bull dog. But I thought they were a cool idea for a street car and actually saw one parked in front of a Deli once. Which I now find surprising since they made fewer than 100 of them. But then it was in San Marino, and students at San Marino High School across the street drive Ferarris to school... Oh yea, tha car, it's a TVR Tuscan with a 289 Ford V8. http://www.motorbase.com/vehicle/by-id/147/
Do a Google search for "Bad Bascom" Chevy and one of the hits is the Supercar Registry, and in the discussion the link sends you to are scanned pages of a Hot Rod mag article on the Bad Bascom, as well as Bill Thomas' Fastback Chevy II, which he did drag race. BTW, R & D Unique makes a 1/25 scale curbside kit of both a Cheetah coupe and roadster.
Thanks - the pictures I posted are from that article. I know about the fastbacks, but I was not sure about Bascom drag racing. I seem to remember a picture of it on the strip. Sorry Mike, I don't want to lead your post astray... Mutt
Yeah, the Griffith was no thing of beauty... But this one was! The Lister Costin Coupe. They should have made one with a SBC in it...
Very cool, and yet another early '60s GT shape.. the Cheetah, Daytona Coupe, 250 GTO, and this Listar coupe were all the inspirations for some of my favorite newer cars I've built (I both had a Cheetah and Cobra Daytona 1/24 slot car as a kid), as was the GT40 (which was king of the hill when I was growing up). Great thread!
I mentioned this thread at the coffee shop to a friend who has a '59 'Vette with a modified Rochester F.I. He has been trying to find more info on Thomas' modifications to that unit. Does anybody know if Thomas left an archive of his research and development of that F.I. or are there any of his survivors that one might contact about that ? How about magazine articles, etc. ? Any kind of information would be helpful.....Thanks in advance !
I'll look through my mags to see what I can find. I do have a Feb. '66 issue of Hot Rod that has an article on tuning Rochester injection. I can e-mail you scans if you want. It's written by Norm Burger, not Thomas. Mutt
There was a Cheetah Funny Car for sale in Tucson awhile ago. It was for sale along time in the local autotrader and in National Dragster in the nostalga section. I saw it listed elsewhere also. I beleive they e-mailed me pics. I will have to look for them. Miles
There were 2 factory Cheetah drag cars. There were a good number of other dragsters using Cheetah bodies that some fiberglass car body companies used to make (Davis Motorsports out of Reno NV used to make them, but the body does not show up on their website anymore, and I believe one or two other manufacturers in the late 60's - 70's era made them). To the poster who mentioned the TVR. I had a friend with a 70s era TVR with a hopped up Ford Cortina engine that was a nice small sports car. In the early 70's I went with a friend to look at a Griffith that was in a garage a couple streets away from where I lived. It was owned by a really notirious Massachusetts criminal who was in prison. The car was at his mother's house. It had a built 351 Ford engine with a big 4 barrel on a high rise manifold, and to get hood clearance someone glued/glassed on one of those 60's style teardrop shaped hood scoops. In order to get clearance for the V8 engine/bellhousing and 4 spd trans, they lost a LOT of precious room inside the car. It had the smallest footbox area for the clutch/brake and gas pedal I have ever seen in car. Although we could not road test the car, I sat in it, and there is NO WAY I could have driven the car with shoes on. The pedals were that close together. It was nutty. The brake pedal was about 3/4 to 1 inch from the gas pedal. My friend ended up not buying the car and I hear it eventually went to the Lawyer of the imprisoned owner to help pay his bill. I ended up meeting a friend of the owner who told me that one night while returning to the Boston area from Western Mass on the Mass Turnpike (at about 3 AM), they had the car up to about 155 Miles an Hour, but had to slow down as the windshield was starting to push inside the car, distorting the rubber windshield gasket. I was told that the owner was planning on installing those NASCAR windshield clips to hold the windshield in at speed.
Here are a couple of Cheetah sites. Replicas have not lasted because they suffer the shortcomings of the original. http://www.cheetahracecars.org/ http://www.cheetahcars.com/index.htm
Has anyone experimented with moving the engine forward in the chassis in order to gain some stability? Seems to me about 4"± would do a good job at stabalizing the car and only require a U joint-on-a-U joint or a CV joint for a driveshaft, That's about 5% of the wheelbase, and there'd be minimal visual difference since the hood wouldn't have to be changed except for the Carb opening being that much farther forward.
John -- A Cheetah has been reconfigured, although I'm not sure how or to what extent the work was carried out. Here are some words about it from a Cheetah site, followed by a pic of the car . . . These photos show owner/driver Fred Yeakel's Teardrop 8 race car at Laguna Seca Raceway. Fred's car is the first fiberglass bodied Cheetah produced. It did previous duty for Bardahl before becoming the Alan Green Chevrolet car. The Cheetah's road manners are such that Fred is the only one willing to drive it. The car was refurbished by Mike Scott's Corvette Corrections in Anaheim, California. They have been doing restos on some of the more exotic Chevrolet-powered sportscars for the last 15 years. Recent work included rearranging the Cheetah for better weight distribution. Originally the front/rear weight bias on the short wheelbase was a somewhat uncomforting 48/52. After the rework the specs are a more confidence inspiring 60/40. Car and driver were out of commission for a while due to and unrelated injury. We hope to see 'em back on the track soon. It's a bitchin' car.
I know it doesn't help any with the real McCoy, but it'll give you an idea how much I love the Cheetah's. I've carried around this slot car body for around 40 years. When I get too old and fat to work on the real ones I plan to build a scale static model. I see they have the resin bodies now. It was too tall and wouldn't corner worth a shit. I even bought the American 5 spoke slot car wheels to give it more realism. Big deal! it still wouldn't corner but it looked pretty good for that time period. Damn i love these cars. The kit cars have always seemed just out of my reach. It seemed that no matter what the decade you could buy a NICE early Ford for what a basic body and frame would cost. I stayed with the Fords. With all those replica companys you'd think there would be some unfinished projects reduced for quick sale.
Ooooh! Oooh! Found some pics of the Thomas FI mods in an old book. Will post some info when I finish reading. I think searching PHR and HRM roughly 1963-65 would turn up more info--what I found is in a Chevy high performance big book put out by Petersen in about '63, in an OCee Rich article on the injection. It involves the early vertical plenum and a single throttle. I know Thomas also worked on the late plenum and added a second throttle in some versions--I haven't found the goods on that yet. The pictures are good enough to allow the mods to be pretty well duplicated. Basically, he bandsawed the plenum open, cut down the hidden internal ram tubes, and enlarged the area of the ports before welding it back together.
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