They Found a Rare Fast & Furious Prop Car in Montana—Then Sliced It Onto an Off-Road Buggy

When normal people scroll through Facebook Marketplace, they usually end up with used furniture or spare tools. When the fabrication madmen at Grind Hard Plumbing Co browse the classifieds, they manage to stumble across an abandoned piece of cinematic motorsport history.

Tucked away in Montana, the team discovered a complete, bare fiberglass shell replicating a first-generation Audi R8. But this was no amateur kit-car mold—it was an authentic Fast & Furious stunt vehicle from the silver screen.

"Once again my marketplace addiction has paid off," channel host Ethan explained. "This time in the form of finding a fiberglass Audi R8 body. It turns out this shell is one of seven built for the Fast and Furious 7 movie. Why they built seven and how this one ended up in Montana, who knows, but we lucked into finding it for a reasonable price. And it's going to make the coolest-looking side-by-side ever".

Rather than restoring the prop to its movie roots as a pavement cruiser, the team immediately hatched a far more unhinged plan: grafting the low-slung German supercar shell directly onto the chassis of a high-flying desert racer to build the ultimate Audi R8 pre-runner.

Before any fabrication could begin, the builders needed a donor capable of matching the ambitious concept. Their platform of choice was an already abused, fully race-prepped 2017 Can-Am Maverick X3 Turbo side-by-side.

The machine was already an absolute dirt weapon. Outfitted with heavy-duty trailing arms, King internal bypass shocks, an aggressive 240-horsepower performance tune, race radios, GPS tracking, and a fortified roll cage, the Can-Am was built specifically for grueling off-road endurance events.

Remarkably, their tape measure revealed that the side-by-side's 104-inch wheelbase sat almost dead-on with the Audi R8 body's 103-inch proportions. Eager to see the silhouette, the crew used an excavator to casually drop the fiberglass shell over the stock roll cage, driving it into the shop with Ethan peering blindly out of the unmounted windshield opening.

"That's how you build an Audi R8 side by side in five minutes," Ethan joked. "Took less time to build than it does to get in and out of".

Transforming the race buggy into a believable supercar demanded stripping every unnecessary bracket, body panel, and lighting harness from the chassis. But before breaking out the saws, the crew decided the lightened, naked Can-Am deserved one final farewell rip around their mountain dirt course.

With hundreds of pounds of excess weight stripped away, the turbocharged machine turned into a pure stunt rig. Launching off their backyard dirt berms, the buggy caught massive air time, flying flat out toward a steep embankment at over 40 mph while cameraman John held on for dear life in the passenger seat.

"That was a new record. That was pretty freaking good," the team celebrated after landing. "That's like a solid three seconds of air time… Jumping an R8 like that would just be absolutely absurd".

Once the dust settled, the reality of the engineering puzzle set in. To get the sleek Audi body low enough to look proportionate without sitting like a monster truck, the entire stock roll cage had to be severed from the frame using a reciprocal saw dubbed the "supercar saw".

Peeling back the remaining floorboards also revealed the battle scars of the Can-Am's prior racing life. Tube sections were dented, multiple joints were crudely re-welded in the field, and key sections of the frame were crinkled from hard impacts.

Worse still, the 103-inch movie shell didn't quite sit flush against the Can-Am's rear suspension geometry. The only viable solution was radical: slicing the main tubular chassis completely in half directly behind the cockpit and stretching the entire vehicle by three inches.

Lengthening the tapered frame rails turned into a grueling wrestling match of custom lathe-turned inner sleeves, heavy-duty ratchet straps, and sledgehammer persuasion.

"And this, ladies and gentlemen, is what's known as the sunken cost fallacy," Ethan laughed mid-struggle. "Even though at this point it would still probably have been easier and better to start over with a new plan, the amount of time and energy I've already put into it makes me feel like I have to follow through with the original plan".

Eventually, the sleeves slid home. The team welded the frame back together and immediately started bending fresh 1.5-inch and 1.75-inch DOM steel tubing to fabricate a reinforced, bespoke roll cage tucked cleanly inside the Audi's cabin footprint.

The biggest hurdle in building a true pre-runner out of an exotic coupe isn't speed—it's wheel travel. A factory Can-Am Maverick X3 features up to 24 inches of suspension stroke, meaning the massive off-road tires swing violently upward over big landings.

"We're trying to cram two feet of suspension travel into a supercar body," Ethan pointed out.

To verify clearances, the builders removed the primary springs from the King coilovers and jacked the front suspension to full bump stop. The tires naturally buried themselves deep into the fiberglass, forcing the crew to aggressively trim out the Audi's wheel arches and front fender lines to allow the suspension to articulate without pulverizing the bodywork.

The low roofline also introduced a severe ergonomic headache. With race helmets on, headroom was practically non-existent, forcing the team to ditch the Can-Am's giant double-walled aluminum race fuel cell to drop the bucket seats down to the floor pans. Sitting that low and pushed roughly a foot and a half further back than a factory R8 driver, forward visibility over the broad fiberglass hood dropped to zero.

"You can't see anything in front of you. Nothing at all," they realized after testing the driving posture. "We're going to have to put some trail cams up front or something".

Despite finding that both the battered Can-Am frame and the hand-laid movie prop were noticeably twisted and asymmetrical from years of abuse, the team managed to fabricate rigid front alignment mounts on the shock towers to lock the body into place.

Rolled out into the daylight, the bizarre mashup of high-clearance off-road suspension and sleek mid-engine exotic styling already looks like a post-apocalyptic desert raider straight out of a video game. With the frame lengthened, the cage structure framed out, and tire clearances established, the team plans to plumb the new fuel cell, mount permanent body brackets, and prep the 240-horsepower monster for high-speed desert shakedowns.