Photos courtesy Bob Auxier, except where noted.
Bill Thomas’s Cheetah may very well have become a legend on par with Carroll Shelby’s Cobra if it hadn’t been for a number of factors, a shop fire and a sudden withdrawal of funding from Chevrolet among them. However, Thomas had even larger plans beyond those homologation racing coupes, and the never-completed prototype for those plans, what he called the Super Cheetah, has come up for sale after resting in a garage for 40 years.
Thomas was certainly no unknown quantity in Chevrolet performance during the 1950s and 1960s. An engineer by training, the Southern Californian took an interest in Chevrolets – Corvettes in particular – and not only racked up dozens of road-race wins behind a Corvette’s wheel, but also became an expert in tuning Chevrolet’s Rochester fuel-injection systems and small-block V-8s. He got his foot in the door with Chevrolet in 1961, sticking small-blocks into Chevy IIs, and when Shelby introduced the Cobra, Thomas approached Chevrolet with a plan to strike back: Setting up shop in Anaheim, California, with master fabricator Don Edmunds, he’d build 100 fiberglass-bodied Chevrolet-powered coupes to satisfy FIA homologation requirements. Fuel-injected 327s would provide the power, running through Corvette drivetrain components, including the Corvette’s independent rear suspension, though the drivetrain would be considerably shortened – to the point where Thomas required only a u-joint, and no driveshaft between the tail of the transmission and the rear end’s center section.
Bill Thomas with a Cheetah. Photo courtesy Greg Sharp, Wally Parks NHRA Motorsports Museum.
To package it all, Thomas decided on a custom chassis with a 90-inch wheelbase and a sleek gullwing-door coupe body. After Edmunds finished the first two prototype bodies in aluminum from California Metal Stamping sections built over Edmunds’s wooden buck, the rest were built from fiberglass. The bodies provided little room for the driver – and even less venting for the heat that built up inside of them – but also dropped the Cheetah’s weight down to around 1,500 pounds and enabled 200-plus-MPH top speeds. Even before homologation, the Cheetah competed successfully in SCCA’s modified classes, but a rule change during the 1964 racing season – to force manufacturers to build 1,000 cars for homologation instead of 100 – contributed to Chevrolet’s decision to pull its funding for the Cheetah project in May 1964. According to Bob Auxier of BTM Race Cars, which builds continuation Cheetahs today, Bill Thomas built just 19 chassis and 33 bodies before the funding ran out (At least one company, Allied Fiberglass, offered replica bodies for sale for a while.). While Thomas tried to keep the venture going on his own afterward, a September 1965 fire brought those efforts to a halt. What remained of the venture was sold off at a sheriff’s auction in the summer of 1970.
Original rendering of the Super Cheetah.
One reason Thomas tried to keep the Cheetah alive even after Chevrolet’s withdrawal from the project ironically plays into Chevrolet’s reasons for withdrawing in the first place. According to Auxier, Thomas only intended for the Cheetahs to serve as the developmental prototypes for the Super Cheetah, a grand touring car meant for street use that would address all the issues that cropped up on the “little Cheetah.” Thomas widened it by four inches, lengthened it by 19 inches, made the doors 10 inches wider, and fixed some suspension issues that plagued the initial cars. He also envisioned the Super Cheetah using a choice of big-block or small-block engines, manual or automatic transmissions, and creature comforts such as air conditioning.
Chevrolet’s experimental Corvair Monza GT.
His inspiration for the Super Cheetah’s styling came in part from the Chevrolet Corvair Monza GT. According to Auxier, Thomas did some developmental work on the Monza GT’s engine and chassis in 1961-1962 and obviously took a shine to the kamm-style tail that Larry Shinoda and Tony Lapine incorporated in their design for the mid-engine experimental car. “A lot of people said that the Super Cheetah was styled off the Cobra Daytona coupe, but that’s not the case,” Auxier said. “Bill had his own drawings done for the Super Cheetah that clearly show the rear end inspired by the Monza GT.”
The front end, however, was pure Cheetah. In fact, Thomas took the aluminum nose, cowl, doglegs and windshield header off one of the two prototype Cheetahs – according to Auxier, the one that he sent to GM for testing purposes (the very first of those two cars) – and mated it to the Super Cheetah’s rear section. Because Edmunds had left Thomas’s venture before Thomas began work on the Super Cheetah, Thomas again turned to California Metal Stamping to shape the remainder of the the aluminum pieces for the body, then had Don Borth and Warren Williams assemble the body. “Bill used the aluminum body simply because he didn’t have the funds for another body,” Auxier said. “He knew that the prototype’s aluminum body would be torn up racing anyway.” (Indeed, the first prototype Cheetah’s chassis was rebodied in fiberglass and wrecked multiple times over the years. Apparently only three of the first-run Cheetah’s still have their original bodies mated to their original chassis.)
Thomas began work on the Super Cheetah in 1963, before Chevrolet pulled its funding. He generated a spec sheet and even outlined plans for fiberglass-bodied production Super Cheetahs and to formulate an assault on Le Mans in 1965 with the aluminum prototype Super Cheetah, likely with Jerry Titus at the wheel.
“Chevrolet got nervous when they saw Bill’s plans for the Super Cheetah,” Auxier said. “They saw it as competition for the Corvette, and that probably caused them to pull out more than anything.”
At 100 units, that wouldn’t have been very likely, but the 1,000-unit mark started to look somewhat significant against the Corvette’s production numbers, at the time hovering around 22,000 to 23,000.
Whatever the exact cause of the pullout, Thomas continued to piece the Super Cheetah together for the next year or so, installing a drivetrain, suspension, brakes (discs versus the little Cheetah’s drums), and wheels and tires to make it a roller, but after the fire – which occurred in a separate part of the shop from where Thomas kept the Super Cheetah – he put it away into storage and focused on building race engines. At the sheriff’s auction, none other than Don Edmunds bought the Super Cheetah with a winning bid of $300. Edmunds then sold it about a year later for $1,750, untouched, sitting on the chassis jig for the smaller Cheetahs with just a small-block V-8 mocked into place. A man in Memphis, Tennessee, bought it and then left it in his garage, again untouched, for the next 40 years.
Super Cheetah as found in a garage in Memphis, Tennessee.
Auxier – who began building continuation Cheetahs with Bill Thomas’s blessing in 2001, before Thomas died in October 2009 – said he tracked the Super Cheetah down 20 years ago but wasn’t able to actually view it until the family of the man who bought it agreed to sell it to him in August 2011. Since removing it from its garage, he has made it a roller again, this time with a 427-cu.in. Chevrolet V-8, Muncie M22 four-speed transmission and 2.72-geared Corvette rear end. While he’s currently working toward finishing it in the exact configuration that Bill Thomas envisioned for the 1965 24 Hours of Le Mans – in Corvette Daytona Blue with red and white stripes up the nose and black interior – he has also put it up for sale on the Hemmings.com classifieds with an asking price of $1.25 million. Auxier said his original plan was to finish the Super Cheetah for the 2014 Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance; in his listing on Hemmings.com he will consider taking on an investor to complete it for the concours. “I think it’s worth $2.5 million if I finish it,” he said.
Auxier had put the Cheetah continuation company up for sale in 2011, but found no buyers and said he was simply looking for investors at the time. He has since returned to building continuation Cheetahs from his shop in Glendale, Arizona. He also said he is developing plans to build more Super Cheetahs in carbon fiber.