Someone Turned a 1984 Tamiya Grasshopper Into a 74-MPH MonsterThe Tamiya Grasshopper has been around since May 1984, and Tamiya still sells it today in essentially the same form. Same bathtub chassis, same friction dampers, same Mabuchi 380-type motor that tops out somewhere between 10 and 15 mph depending on what surface you're running it on. It was never built to be fast. It was built to be the first RC car a kid could actually afford to put together.That's exactly why a YouTuber Kevin Talbot built one – not because it's competitive, but because it isn't. "Nostalgia," he explains in his video. "When we were kids and we're looking through catalogs and through shop windows and you saw these RC cars, we all really wanted them." He assembled the kit, slapped the pre-cut stickers on the body, battled an inexplicably tight battery compartment for several minutes, and took it to the South Cams Radio Controlled Car Club – known to regulars as Vinnie's Club – to race it against a modern Team Associated B7 buggy. The B7 got 20 laps. The Grasshopper got 12. Nobody was surprised.Then Someone Showed Up With a 74-MPH GrasshopperAfter the race, Kevin encountered another Grasshopper at the club that had been taken considerably further. The owner had kept the original body and color scheme intact, but underneath it was a different machine entirely: an alloy gearbox, metal gears, slick tires, and an 8.5-turn brushless motor where the stock 380 used to be. Top speed? Seventy-four miles per hour.AdvertisementAdvertisementThe stock version manages maybe 15 mph on a good day. This one does roughly five times that, which puts it in the same league as purpose-built speed machines, despite looking like something pulled off a hobby shop shelf four decades ago.RC forum communities have long cautioned that throwing a brushless motor into a stock Grasshopper is a short route to a destroyed gearbox – the original plastic internals weren't rated for that kind of torque load. The 74-mph build addressed this directly with the alloy gearbox and metal gears, which is what separates a functional high-speed build from an expensive parts explosion. Tamiya's own current Grasshopper II Black Special now ships with a TBLE-04S ESC that supports sensored brushless motors, which suggests the company has quietly confirmed where the platform is heading.For Kevin, the point was never speed – "There's just something special about a Tamiya build," he said, "the box art, having to assemble it, the smell of the tires, the instructions." But the 74-mph car is a useful reminder that nostalgia and engineering ambition aren't mutually exclusive. The Grasshopper has been a beginner's kit for four decades. Apparently, with enough work, it doesn't have to stay that way.