A little History

After Ford had retained Carroll Shelby to build a car that would beat Ferrari at LeMans, GM hired Bill Thomas in 1963 to build a style machine that would compete with the Shelby Mustang and Cobra.  Thomas was nicknamed Mr. Corvette for having achieved almost 100 victories with Corvettes he built to race.  Bill Thomas parlayed his Corvette success with GM into a contract as a performance guru.  He ended up building between 10 and 27 Cheetah’s.  One model was used in the Elvis Presley movie spin out in 1965.  Early models of the car DNF races in 1963 due to crashes or mechanical failures.  The most successful Cheetah’s were driven by Ralph Salyer who won 11 major USRRC races in 1964 and many local and minor events across the USA between 1964 and 1967.  Salyer’s race car #25 was also known as the Pro-Sal Cheetah, named after its mechanic Gene Crowe as well as Salyer.

This model is my attempt at the #64 – 1963 Cheetah built by Bill Thomas

Prior to applying decals

A can of Tamiya was used – Italian Red; to paint this model.

The Body kit is from MRRC

The body was mounted to an MMRC sebring chassis that was assembled with to match wheel base of body and a brass tube was glued in place to support the front axel  These chassis are the best plastic chassis for the Sport Car class in my opinion.

Front Wheels RSslot  – RSW005 – 13′ x 5mm wide

Rear Wheels RSslot – RSW006 – 13″ x 7mm wide

Vanski Motor 14,000 RPM;

Gearing 10P x 23 offset

Weighs 62 grams complete “as is”.  Some weight will be added although none is required, the car runs very well and handles well as is.