Ten used Gran Turismo icons we’ve found for sale from £1,500 upwards

Hands up if your long path to petrolhead status began in the digital confines of classic PlayStation driving sim, Gran Turismo. If you can tear those hands from your joypad, anyway. JDM used car prices are now heading rapidly north, linked perhaps to those avid gameplayers in the late Nineties and early Noughties having slightly deeper pockets than before. 

One of the most affordable places to start is a Subaru Impreza Turbo; just a stock, 200-odd horsepower saloon free of suffixes but possessing a chassis of gorgeous balance and performance that can still (just about) tail a Golf R on wet road. Prices start from below ten grand for higher mileages, but £15k upwards seems to be the kicking off point for more immaculate cars like this one.

More money is needed to get you into a Mitsubishi Evo of similar talents (and vintage). Arguably these are the more flamboyant, adjustable and outright extrovert of the Impreza/Lancer arch-rivalry. 

Prices and specs vary wildly between early IIIs and IVs, all of which will be unofficial imports, and the official UK cars and special editions (such as the vibrant Tommi Makinen, pictured) which followed. Twenty grand gets you this official UK Evo VI with light, sympathetic mods – CarPlay included. We know we’re tempted…

Buying a Nineties-era Toyota Supra is akin to a choose your own adventure. Do you go bone-stock, but put up with a slushy four-speed automatic gearbox, or dabble with the dark side of tuning to get a manually shifted A80 with a tonne of mods and almost twice its factory output and a car its vendor bills as “a serious piece of kit?” Both nip in just under forty grand and they look startlingly similar from the outside. Quite what happens next is up to you…

One of the prettiest Japanese cars of them all? Or, indeed, one of the prettiest cars of the whole Nineties era? The last of three RX-7 generations took the original, pop-up illuminated recipe but gave it some welcome curves, while perched up front was a dainty 1.3-litre rotary engine with twin turbos for a stock 237bhp in UK cars or up to 276bhp, as per the Japanese Gentleman’s agreement, in JDM models such as this one. Or naturally much more for cars that’ve swung by the tuning shop.

“Get in while you still can” is very much the motto here. The R33’s successor has long sailed into truly stratospheric value status, the superb R34 now the reserve of the truly deep pocketed. The R32 and R33 still fall into budget, though, the latter being one of the breakout stars of the debut Gran Turismo instalment. 

We’ve sourced one of the small handful of official UK V-Spec cars, in proper Sonic Silver, and possessing a mite under 100,000 miles. With just two owners to its name – and for sale at the same dealer who peddled it new – by GT-R standards it’s a veritable bargain.

You want a four-wheel drive JDM hero at a much slimmer price? Step this way. The Celica GT-Four can claim fame in another spectacularly Nineties driving sim – co-starring in Sega Rally arcade machines alongside the Lancia Delta Integrale – where it looked iconic in its Castrol colours. 

Rally stages didn’t enter the GT realm until its second instalment, but the boisterous, road-legal ST205-gen Celica also appeared de-liveried from day one.

Never officially sold in the UK, would we have ever known (and loved) the FTO without Polyphony Digital’s seminal driving sim? Plenty of gamers fell in love with it, though, its shrunken Aston DB7 aesthetic closing a front-engine, front-wheel drive car (FF in GT terms) with friendly handling and progressive performance.

Those for sale now (in the real world) fall under the five grand bracket, though you’ll have to endure an auto ‘box. Still pretty, though.

You thought Skyline values had gone sky-high? Get a load of the original NSX. Honda could barely shift ‘em in the UK when new, despite Ayrton Senna’s well documented development miles and the near-instant impact it had on established supercar rivals. Would the Ferrari 355 have been such a sweetly useable replacement for the 348 without the NSX?

Anyhow, prices now look utterly out of hand. Here’s a near 100,000-miler for £72,999 and an NSX R, one of the sweetest handling cars of all time, for precisely ten times that. Yes, really. 

All of this utterly bewildering to you? Or the idea of a 550bhp Supra that someone else has modified giving you the willies? Then reset back to those oh-so arduous Gran Turismo licence tests and spend a mere £1,500 on this Mazda Demio. 

“Powered by a responsive 1.5 litre petrol engine,” the ad reads, “this GSi variant offers a balanced driving experience.” But balanced enough to accelerate up to (and then stop by) some 1000m cones in just 36 seconds to begin your B licence process?

Another legend of early GT gameplay, and one of your earliest (and cheapest) shots at mastering front-engine, rear-drive handling. The same is true in the real world, where these two-tone wonders are flung about with abandon in drift videos and rally competitions, their near 50/50 weight balance and hedonistic twin-cam engines a joy to merely spectate. 

Manga fans will know it from Initial D fame too, of course. Its legendary status was underscored when the Toyota GT86 reinvigorated its spirit in 2012 – then again a few years later, when Toyota restarted official parts production to keep the AE86 legend alive on road. Which is welcome news if you’re serious about buying one made of metal rather than mere pixels.