Somewhere around 1986, we got the bug to have a badass R/C car of our own. We scrimped. We saved. We scrounged, and we didn't buy an RC/10. Or an Optima. Somehow, we believed that the Tamiya Fox was obviously the coolest R/C money could buy, thus dooming us to a life of fetishizing Citroëns and Mantas. Regardless, that car frankly was pretty awesome to an eleven-year-old boy; we spent plenty of hours terrorizing motorists and wayward dogs with the torquey little buggy, which eventually ended up with a candy-apple red '67 GTO body, thus pre-dating our eight years of GM A-Body ownership by um, three years or so. Steve Finkbuilt has a slightly older fantasy — that of Tamiya's Sand Scorcher Baja Bug. And given that the car is from the company's pre-ABS-plastic era, it goes for far too much money for an econo tinkerer like himself. So, naturally, he built his own, using a venerable Grasshopper chassis as the basis. [Finkbuilt]

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