eBay Find of the Day: A Super-Rare Bill Thomas ’65 Cheetah

If you compared the sports car lineups of 1960’s GM versus 1960’s Ford, you would find a counterpart to just about every car. The Corvette had the Thunderbird, the Mustang had the Camaro, the Fairlane had the Chevelle, so on and so forth. The one glaring exception is that Ford had Carroll Shelby and his Cobras.

What did GM have? Just a handful of the Bill Thomas-built Cheetahs, which did well in racing, but never reached that critical acclaim that empowers Shelby’s to this day.

However, there is one benefit to being a sales failure, and that is the rarity that comes with these cars. Just six Cheetahs were ever built and somehow, some way, one of these cars made it up on to eBay, where it failed to meet its reserve.

The Bill Thomas Cheetah was built by Mr. Thomas and BTM as an answer to the growing popularity of the Shelby Cobra cars. In a lot of ways, the Cheetah was actually superior to the Cobra, achieving a near-perfect front/back weight balance by moving the engine way, way back. This also allowed the transmission to plug right into the rear end, and had the side effect of slowly cooking the driver’s legs (as they were to either side of the engine.)

Still, the 377cui engine was reportedly faster in the ¼ mile than even a 427 Cobra, and in 1964 the Cheetah won numerous races at the hands of several famed racing drivers. The one up on eBay is #001, but even so, the top bid was barely over $35,000, well short of what is surely a six-figure reserve. People just don’t appreciate these cars for what they were, which is a shame, because it is an important part of Chevy racing history.

About the author

Chris Demorro

Christopher DeMorro is a freelance writer and journalist from Connecticut with two passions in life; writing and anything with an engine.
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