- BODY: Aurora Model Motoring
- WHEELS: Vincent
- TIRES: Road Race Replicas
This car has won more tournaments on my tabletop than any other car in my fleet, so much so that it has been dubbed “The King Of The Hill.” Its not that its exceptionally fast; it is fast, but I have many other cars that have higher top speeds in a straight line. It’s the handling that’s really the secret to its success; it is so nimble and well balanced and holds the turns so well that it can almost complete an entire circuit at nearly full throttle.
This was the first Cheetah I bought; I got it as a body only on an ebay auction at a fantastic price considering its near perfect condtion. I liked it so much I’ve since bought 3 others-I just bought my 4th yesterday, in fact, in orange-and of course I’ll get around to profiling those as well, but this one is the most exciting of the bunch.
As another point of interest, this is the 3rd car I fitted with a transparent blue chassis, and its one of only 2 blue chassis I’ve gotten decent performance out of. The other one (on my blue Ferrari Dino) is fitted with Black Dragon magnets, but this one has its stock magnets Certainly the car’s small size and light weight contributes to its fierce performance, but it is a well proportioned and nicely detailed body, so it doesn’t look “too small” (as some of the early T-Jets do, especially those that were originally designed as Vibrators).
One final note for any fellow die-cast collectors: as a kid growing up, no main line toy car company made a model of a Cheetah in 1:87 – 1:64; It wasn’t until I saw a picture of one in a book that I knew what they even looked like in real life, so I grew up believing it wasn’t even a real car. That belief came from my one reference: the Tootsietoy model! I was never a big fan a Tootsietoys-never collected them, anyhow-but I had a basket full of them as almost every American kid my age did back then, and the Cheetah was always one of my favorites. During its production run the Tootsietoy model was cast with 2 different racing numbers, a 5 and a 18; it was for that reason that I chose to assign this car racing #18. I believe this was the only Tootsietoy made-in the small scale, anyway-with a racing number cast into the body.
