The Cobra killer that never was: the Cheetah. Image: Ultimagecarpage.com.

In 1963 GM was watching and reeling at the funds Ford was sending over to Carroll Shelby’s Cobra, and they knew they had to retaliate. They also knew that the Corvette wouldn’t be able to battle the Cobra head to head consistently so they contacted Bill Thomas and contracted him to build them a “Cobra killer.”

Thomas was a well known Chevy performance guru and worked with his designer Don Edmunds to build the car you see here, the Cheetah. The Cheetah was as radical looking as it was performing and employed a number of design considerations to help it be the Cobra Killer that they wanted it to be.

The Cheetah's swoopy lines gave it incredible sex appeal. This replica was created by BTM, LLC. Image: Horsepowersports.com.

To start, the weight was kept to as minimal as possible. With full fluids she weighed in right around 1650 pounds which was roughly 500 pounds less than the Cobra. The wheel base was 90-inches long and had a mid engine configuration that shoved the cockpit to the tail of the car like an old-school dragster.

The driver sat nearly on top of the rear wheels and the transmission was connected directly to the rear end. That’s right, it had no drive shaft! The configuration also led to a near perfect front/rear weight distribution of 48/52.

The full race motor was a 327 that was bored and stroked 377 cubes and topped with a Bill Thomas tuned Rochester fuel injection producing roughly 520hp. Initial testing was done at Daytona and revealed top speeds of 220 miles per hour, which was fast enough to literally blow its own doors off!

Unfortunately for the Cheetah, it suffered from a number of bugs and setbacks in its development. Its timing was also an issue as the Ford GT40 quickly became the premier mid-engine race car displacing the Cobra, and as such the Cheetah was almost out of date the day it was born.

As development on the Cheetah continued Chevrolet started to pull out of factory sponsored racing, and that, plus a fire at Bill Thomas’ shop that destroyed the wood buck used to make Cheetah bodies effectively killed the car.