Are golf carts powersports vehicles? Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps they’re some sort of UTV—one that’s designed for rich people who like spending their days hitting balls with sticks on gigantic parcels of land. Kidding aside, the fact is simply that golf carts are probably the furthest thing away from badass.
That is, unless you throw in a Yamaha YZF-R1 engine into the mix. And that’s exactly what the folks at Grind Hard Plumbing Co. did in their latest project. This thing’s been around for quite some time now but was all sorts of crazy sketchy. How sketchy? Well, how does no front brakes, a bent rear, a broken frame, and very bad steering geometry sound? Oh, and did I mention that this thing has 180 horsepower?
Naturally, this thing is the textbook definition of a safety hazard, and in Grind Hard Plumbing Co.’s latest video, they try to change that. But who are we kidding—can an R1-swapped golf cart ever truly be safe?
Now, to get this thing running and driving right, tons of work needed to be done. For starters, the golf cart received a full suspension refresh with a bunch of custom-fabricated components. It also has a bunch of reinforcements to the frame, making it capable of handling some pretty gnarly terrain. You can watch all of the details in action in Grind Hard’s hour-long video, and who knows, maybe you’ll pick up a thing or two for your next DIY project.
But the fact remains that this thing is absolutely insane, and will absolutely be banned from any golf course. But hey, I’d love to see this thing ripping up a golf course and kicking up sand traps and just causing a riot, all while rich boomers in their floral shirts and colorful shorts scratch their heads in disbelief.
At the end of it all this thing is more side-by-side than golf cart, really. It has a roll cage, long-travel suspension with an impressive amount of articulation, and knobby all-terrain tires that let it go pretty much anywhere. It would’ve been cool to see just how much more the folks at Grind Hard could’ve done with this thing, but alas, it was wrecked after crashing into a tree, with the crew’s meticulous work on the frame and suspension pretty much undone.
Needless to say, the folks at Grind Hard aren’t ones to give up, and this crazy R1-swapped golf cart will surely be rebuilt and live to shred another day.
