Designed by Bill Thomas, the Cheetah ultimately didn’t have the market success the Cobra did, but the Cheetah’s performance was superior to Cobra at Daytona in 1964. With its fuel-injected Chevrolet Corvette engine, the Cheetah set a record-breaking 215 mile-per-hour lap at Daytona. Not too shabby on 1964 tires!
So why haven’t most people heard of this car? Well, as much as Chevrolet wanted a Cobra beater, corporate shifts in management shelved the Cheetah racecar project, which resulted in only approximately 23 of these cars being produced from 1963 to 1966. One of the Cheetahs was famously driven by Elvis Presley in the film Spinout.
Sources: Turnology.Com (Rob Krider 2018), Mecums Auction