Well, the first thing I would do is a little tricky, you will need a dremel or something similar because you will have to cut both the front & rear housing where the diffs are because rocks can get trapped there and the belts will snap. Also if you want it to drift you can lock the the rear diff, I used a glue gun & then change the front diff to a one way unit. With that setup it will perform pretty good. Right now I replaced some parts to aluminum & I also replaced the chassis to aluminum so it would add some heft to it. Oh yeah you probably want to replace the dampers to aluminum. As far as the bodies, there's a lot of body options, I just bought the HPI Lexus ISF body for mine.
We have written in there since 1000BC. You can ask for a second hand car as they often pop up. Most of em, like me, are die hard Kyosho nutters and would prefer to help you out rather than make profit. I have sent a heap of parts to the US, sometimes free, just to get a fan up and running. Works backwards for me with US, UK help.
Some of the brushless 1/8's were down many many years ago.
100% recycled electrons were used in this message.