The best project cars for every budget (a motoring journalist's opinion)

So, maybe you've seen Marty and MOOG run through their picks for what car you should buy and mod at every pricepoint between $100 and $100,000. If not, CLICK THIS LINK HERE TO SEE THE EPISODE. 

I've been writing for car magazines (and mostly modified car magazines) for more than 23 years now, so I've seen the car scene change an incredible amount but one thing hasn't change: the fact I'm a broke-ass MFer who has champagne taste on a tap water budget. A lot of motoring journalists are in the same boat as me, and we often talk about what makes a rad project car so, here are some cars I reckon the lads missed off their list:

Mazda SP20 Astina - under $5000

The final Mazda 323 was available in sedan (Protege) or hatch (Astina) form, and the range was topped by the SP20 model. Powered by a two-litre in-line four-cylinder with enough grunt to pump a solid Ronnie Rollback, the lightly sports-flavoured SP20 is a fun, well-built car that has a lot of standard features (power windows, in-dash 6-stack CD player, Nardi steering wheel, alloy wheels) that can be purchased for well under $5000 these days. A yellow SP20 Astina was the first new car I bought and it was reliable as clockwork and more fun to drive than I first realised. These cars have since become a staple of cheap, cheerful transport among my friendship circle in the years since, and they are fantastic first cars as they're easy to work on and there are plenty of uprades available.

BMW E34 535i (manual) - under $10,000

European cars have an unfair reputation of being as reliable as a politician's promise, but I've owned more than a dozen European cars in my 25-year driving history and I can say, hand on heart, that as long as you service them on the dot they're fine. The beaut part of everyone freaking out about reliability means classic Euro cars can be had for an absolute steal, and the E34 BMW 5-series is an A-grade example.

I got this factory 5-speed E34 535i for $6k unregistered. Despite it hailing from 1989 it has working power windows, ice-cold A/C, a strong 150kW NA SOHC 3.5-litre in-line 6-cylinder, sweet-shifting 5-speed manual, great handling, and fairly safe crash rating. Even the electric sunroof and cruise control work perfectly. I've got 18-inch M-Parallel wheels to go on it that I scored for $1500 with brand new tyres, plus a second-hand custom exhaust system for $500. This should see me, even with painfully expensive New South Wales rego, on the road for under $10k.

Mitsubishi Mirange (with heaps of sick mods) - under $15,000

At this price point I'm taking a HARD left turn. I met Marty, Turbo Yoda and Mechanical Stig (among many other legends) on the RS Liberty Club, where we'd happily trot through the internet to buy $500 and them bomb them with several times that amount in mods. In fact, if this were 2009 I'd have put a Gen 1 Series 2 Liberty GX in this spot and hand-on-heart recommended you beautiful people spend $14,500 on sick mods for that absolute dunger of a car. However, you can't build a sweet turbo Subaru Liberty for $15k any more... but you can build an epic FWD sleeper Mirage for that amount. 

Taking a page out of Marty's playbook, grabbing a late '90s Mirage and slapping a super-cheap 4G94 four-banger and turbo on a log manifold in it, wiring a basic Haltech package in, and sending plenty of ethanol to it would be a recipe for EPIC amounts of fun on a ridiculously small budget. Heaps of aftermarket support, easily reshelled into another $500 Mirage if ambition overcomes talent, and dunger enough to avoid too much police attention... where is the downside? 

A '70s Holden project - under $20,000

Once you've got 20-gorillas stuffed in your filthy savings account, you're half a chance at making a bona-fide classic car work as a project. The key here isn't the price of the entry point of buying the car and dragging it home; it's having the tools and the workshop consumables to actually make progress on it. Stuff like welders, welding gas, grinding discs, PPE, welding wire and tips all cost actual pesos, let alone the metal you're going to need to weld into it... which you will given all old cars are made from cheese and failure.

If you're an Aussie reading this your $20k budget will handily get you into a 70s Holden Kingswood - most likely a ute. These are BRILLIANT cars to learn how to do classic cars on, as they're simply built, have EPIC aftermarket support, and will look cool as once you sack them in the weeds and slap some fat wheels on them. They drive like wheelbarrows with flat front tyres but you don't get into old tin for their driving dynamics.

Side note: the car pictured is my first car, an HJ Monaro GTS I bought for $3k in 2000. You won't buy even a rusty HJ Monaro for $30k today, I just wanted to run a picture of a car I miss dearly.

Mk6 Golf GTI - under $25,000

We've hit that point where you can buy a car that is sensible enough to make it seem like you have your life in order, but also fun enough to embrace the drooling degenerate who enjoys Royal Nasho runs on a quiet Thursday night. When it comes to Golfs you can upgrade them like a made-to-order kebab, so they're an easy pick for go-fast thrills, but they're also well-built with very comfortable interiors dripping in convenience features like power windows, radar cruise, sports seats and more. 

Golfs can get a bum wrap today but I remember the days when Nissan Silivas/200SXs were regarded as cars only owned by perverts and other undesirables. These machines can transport you to work and date nights reliably, but then take you to a track day and run numbers, too. Come to the dark side, we have cookies.

Nissan R33 GT-R Skyline - around $75,000

At this price point you're going to be buying some contemporary exotica, and of the cars in that description I'd humbly suggest Nissan's supercar-slaying 90s rocket is the best purchase you can make. Sure, GT-R Skylines have an appetite for eating tens of thousands of dollars just staying on the road, but if you buy the right GT-R and don't modify it into a race-only debt-sled you stand a great chance of being able to sample a piece of 90s engineering that will enthrall and terrify you in equal measure. 

A Honda NSX or FD RX-7 is a better point-to-point sports car, but there is an engagement you have with GT-R the others never had. And, while the Internet loves to lambast the R33 as the "boat" GT-R it's actually the GT-R you want; it doesn't have the dash of a VN Commodore and oil pump gears made of fairy floss like the R32, and it's not overpriced thanks to gullible Americans thinking the R34 GT-R is the second coming of Jesus.

An old sh&#tbox- around (probably over) $100,000

Around 30k you can buy something infinitely sensible that will be reliable transport for years to come... or you can buy a project which will be epic once you've dumped a whole house deposit and the better part of a decade into it. These are life decisions at play here and i can say, having done the latter, I don't regret it.  

If you think of it as annual expenditure, building a $150,000 car over a decade is only $15,000 per-year. Break the car build down into sections because that means you're buildig an engine, then a trans and a diff, then you're onto saving for paint, then a trimmer. Once you split the sections of a build up you realise the bills aren't insurmountabile, and you can pay them (especially if you take on multiple jobs). 

I can say this as someone who walked this path, the road is long and tiring but the feeling of rolling your finished build down the road after years of toil is almost impossible to describe. It's worth the late nights, skinned, knuckles, and stress.