COUPES / GTS
Best: Alpine A110 Bargain: Aston Martin V8 Vantage Brave: Bentley Continental GT
LET’S START WITH THE BIG AND BRAVE OPTION, shall we? Bentley’s Continental GT. The very brave souls amongst you might be drawn to the £16,000 examples with their sub-100,000-mile 6-litre W12s. But you’ll need to consider the complexities of routine maintenance in an engine bay with less room than a central London flat. So too the requirement to replace the brake lines every five years, and the likelihood of an electric window failing, requiring a whole unit rather than a new motor.
These were expensively engineered cars when new, so while the depreciation curve makes them cheaper than a brand new Fiesta ST by nearly ten thousand pounds, the running costs are still in the premium luxury world, where if you have to ask, etc, etc. However, if you can stretch to the mid-£30ks, you could pick up a sub-50,000-mile Conti GT, which, while it might be merely a bucket-list tick, is quite the marker.
Sticking with the used market for our bargain buy brings us to Aston Martin’s VH Vantage, introduced in late 2005 and a car evo contributor Peter Tomalin has firsthand experience of, as reported in our Fast Fleet pages. There are, as you would expect from a car that’s not far off its 20th anniversary, some key areas to investigate, such as signs of corrosion around the door edges, handles and mirror supports and, most importantly, on the rear subframe. Timing-chest gasket replacement, clutches and remedial work to said subframe can all be very expensive reminders that today’s £30-40k Vantage cost more than double these amounts when it was new.
Admittedly it lacked both the straight-line and dynamic performance to see off Porsche’s 997 Carrera – a car we’d snap up in an instant in this price bracket, but there are only so many times you can recommend Porsche’s icon before people switch off! But the Vantage makes up for it with a charm of its own, a V8 that encourages you to enjoy its 7000rpm peak, and a 50/50 weight distribution. For the full five-star experience, though, you’ll need to move your sights – and budget – to an N430.
Or perhaps you’d prefer something from BMW’S M stable? Most compelling is the £20k-and-upwards E92 M3
(the two-door brother of the E90 saloon we recommended earlier), with its V8 that sounds and feels oh-so-special. Its predecessor, the straight-six-powered E46, might be well on the way to modern classic icon status, but the V8 is hunting down its quartet of exhaust pipes with increasing vigour. Although buyer beware, the S58 V8 likes a drink – of fuel
and oil – and the throttle-body actuators and rod bearings can cause catastrophic damage if not caught early.
If you’d like a five-star ecoty runner-up, look no further than Jaguar’s 2014 F-type R, with 542bhp of supercharged V8 dressed in Ian Callum’s pert coupe bodywork. Yours for circa £35,000 and a great alternative for those who find the V8 Vantage a little too Gt-like in how it goes about its business. And keeping it British, Lotus’s Evora and Exige models have been worthy recipients of five-star ratings over the years. A trawl through the classifieds finds an Exige of the same vintage as the F-type that would be ideal if you find the Jag a touch too refined for your liking. An early 2009/10 R35 Nissan GT-R for mid-£30ks and beyond would be impossible for some in the evo office to ignore, and with the tuning potential on offer it could find itself in both the Bargain and Brave camps depending on how far you want to push it. Remember, there will be nothing like an R35 GT-R again, and it could just be the car you kick yourself for never buying.
There are a couple of new-car options in this price bracket, too, and perhaps not surprisingly they are cut from the same lightweight, less-is-more cloth: Alpine’s delectable A110 and Toyota’s frankly outstanding GR86.
The former is easier to come by thanks to it still being on sale and available to order from £51,990 (what’s £2k between friends, and we did find a 2022 example that had covered just 1700 miles for £47,000). The latter is sadly sold out, with the few used examples we found marked up at £40,000, though that still feels decent value for the brilliant driver’s car that it is. Happy hunting!