Soaring value of Japanese sports cars

Big-name exotics hog the limelight at any classic sports car auction. It was certainly the case at the recent Gosford Car Museum sell-off held in Sydney by Pickles Auctions – where a 1965 Ferrari 330GT sold for $420K and a 1977 Holden Torana A9X was flogged for $200K.

European and – in this country – Australian sports cars may tend to dominate proceedings, but at this particular auction one of the prettiest, and as it were among the most attainable, offerings was actually a 1971 Datsun 240Z in resplendent orange with 117,000km showing.

Beautifully proportioned with a dash-to-axle ratio long enough for a ‘DATSUN’ badge to sprawl across it, this pint-sized liftback with a wooden steering wheel, rear louvres, 2.4-litre six-cylinder engine, five speed manual and rear-wheel drive looked pretty much perfect.

But what if $50K-plus is just too high to jump aboard the appreciating-classic train?

Fast forward a decade from that 1971 Zed to the 1983 Toyota AE86, and keen observers of the hachi-roku would have already noted that examples that less than a decade ago asked $15K are now fetching above $30K.

As the heroic final edition of the rear-wheel drive small Toyotas, the duo of AE86s – Trueno with pop-up headlights, Levin with fixed headlights – available in liftback or coupe, scored a legendary 97kW 4A-GE 1.6-litre fuel injected four-cylinder and five-speed manual.

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And it is these imports, rather than the Australian-delivered LSD-less Sprinter with a 4AC 1.6L carby, that are soaring in value today. We spotted a mint Trueno Sprinter Apex GT with 167,000km showing for $33K. In 10 years it could end up where the 240Z is now…

But there are other Japanese sports cars to keep an eye on as well, including obvious candidates such as the Mitsubishi Lancer Evo VI Tommi Makinen Edition (TME), the iconic 1990s rally car for the road. We spotted a mint and stock example with 100,000km showing for $29K before bargaining – and surely in the decade to come it will leap from there.

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Despite being far more popular on Australian soil, prices of its arch rival, the pre-bugeye Subaru Impreza WRX is holding up locally too. Prices will range from $8K for a straight-but-high-kilometre MY00 example of the 160kW/290Nm 2.0-litre boxer turbo sedan, all the way to $20K for a 100,000km unit and $25K for a WRC Blue four-door with 43,000km showing.

The latter is about a similar range for an S15-gen Nissan 200SX, with similar outputs but rear-wheel drive. Finding a stock example will be like turning up to Summernats and trying to find an anti-modifications advocate, but if anything that makes it especially worth the search – the rarer the car, the stronger the retained value.

But whether it be a Toyota MR2 or a Celica GT4 Rallye – okay now we’re getting rare – for the $15K mark, or an NA/NB Mazda MX-5 or early-1990s Honda CRX for half that, this was an era in which the Orient went gangbusters with sporty cars. Expect to cash in soon…