These Are The Most Fun Cars You Can Buy For Less Than £2000

If you’ve got a bit of money burning a hole in your pocket and are itching for a new car to try for a while, we’ve got good news for you. For a pretty meagre outlay you can buy some outstanding examples of properly fun cars. With the help of plenty of pre-digital photography, just look at what you can buy for £2000 - or even a whole lot less…

Ford SportKa

Go ahead: laugh if you want to. The fact remains that the SportKa is many a motoring hack’s guiltiest pleasure. The regular car didn’t have the most masculine image, but the addition of a fizzy 1.6-litre engine and a bit of chassis fettling turned this forgettable biffabout into an absolute hoot.

A wheel at each corner, a short wheelbase, low weight – it all added up to a great drive, turning your everyday urban scratching into a game. These days you don’t have to pay more than £1000 for a good one. Half that will buy a sound runner.

Toyota MR2 GT T-Bar

You won’t get a Japanese grey import Turbo for this price, but you can land a normally-aspirated UK model with the targa-esque T-Bar top. It’s a lovely looking thing. It’s mid-engined, rear-wheel drive and it has pop-up headlights. What’s not to love? For around £1500 you have plenty of options among the classifieds.

If we could offer a word of caution on this one, though, make sure you buy one with good tyres – or fit them yourself ASAP. It’s not that easy to accidentally break traction in the non-turbo cars, but they can still be unforgiving if you’re on budget tyres and the back-end starts to go.

Mazda MX-5

The answer is always… etc. Love it or loathe it, the MX-5 is popular for a reason. The vast majority of those on this side of the motoring media fence have owned one at some point (mine was an imported Eunos Roadster), because they’re cheap, rear-wheel drive, easy to slide, communicative and plentiful. It’s not the stiffest or fastest car here but few will make you smile any more than this.

The world is your oyster if you’ve got £2000 to spend. Less than half that will get you a real peach, but make sure you check thoroughly for rust, because some sellers have been known to either hide it or repair it badly before selling.

Fiat Panda 100hp

No, really, you absolutely can get a Fiat Panda 100hp without stupid mileage for less than £2000. We were stunned to find them, but let’s not complain, eh? The stiffly-sprung Panda warm hatch was an absolute riot, cocking its inside back wheel all the time, turning on a sixpence and generally acting like a puppy on speed. It only had a 1.4-litre engine but it produced more power than the 1.6-litre SportKa, and it’s cheaper to tax, too.

The cheapest we found was £1500, but it’s a category D write-off. It might be fine, but it might not be – you’d want to get it examined. There was also a slightly tired and damaged one for £1150, but we’d avoid that one. The cheapest non-crashed one was £1700, and what a lot of fun that is for the money. At these prices I think I might end up with one.

Renaultsport Clio 182

I had one of these and it redefined my understanding of corner speed. It’d hit an indicated 142mph, too. The issue was that every time I got into it there was a new mechanical or electrical problem, but mine was obviously a Friday afternoon car. For £2000 there’s lots of choice, but always look for a low count of owners. That usually means it’s a fairly good one.

There is a good selection of Clio 172 and 182 models at this money, most of them either damaged, fairly leggy or both (and definitely not Liquid Yellow), but every single one of them is a blast. A growling roar is your soundtrack past 5000rpm, and if you fit good tyres you can amuse yourself on your daily drive by simply not slowing down for roundabouts.

Peugeot 206 GTi 180

If you liked your noughties hot hatchbacks a little prettier, the GTi 180 was a sound bet. That you can now pick them up for £1000 or less is amazing, and not all of them have done a million miles. Dynamically the Peugeot wasn’t the match of the Clio above, but it looked fantastic and it’s now down to a price where you’d easily be forgiven for giving it a go.

Being so short with the wheels pushed out towards the corners, the 180 can be a really good steer on the right road, but owners who’ve had them tested say the actual brake horsepower is down in the low 160s, so you have to work it hard. That’s all part of the appeal.

Mercedes SLK 320

This is not a misprint. Amidst endless SLK 230 Kompressors of the R170 era we found a few 320s. In this company the 320 seems like royalty, packing a creamy 3.2-litre V6 with 218bhp. Along with rear-wheel drive it was good for a very respectable 0-62mph sprint of 6.9 seconds, and having the drive at the back meant that you could really play with the tail. The steering had all the feel of a block of wood, but you’re getting a bulletproof V6 roadster, so stop complaining.

The two we found come in just under budget, with another just £50 over. Yes, the SLK had a bad image much like the MX-5 did, but when you’re getting this much roadster and this much fun for this much money, who’s to tell you you’re wrong?

Citroen Saxo VTS

In my youth the Saxo was ruined by all the boy racers that bought the VTR and ruined them. The VTS was always a little too rarefied and too expensive to insure, so many of them escaped the worst of the bad modifications we saw in the Max Power era. The 16-valve 1.6-litre engine was a screamer and since the Saxo weighed about as much as a pair of trainers it flew along nicely.

They’re relatively rare these days; many have been crashed and written off. But we found a few in the classifieds and this one looks amazingly original. This is a lightweight, chuckable, immensely happy little warm hatch that was an icon in its own time. Buy one before the prices go up.