The cars we wish we bought when we could have

It’s better to have loved and lost, they say, than never to have loved at all. Motoring enthusiasts talk a lot about the cars they shouldn’t have sold back in the day: those that they flogged for £50 in 1980 but now command upwards of £50,000. But more frustrating than missing out on a tidy profit is when sky-high appreciation prevents you from even sampling one of your all-time heroes. 

“I should’ve snapped one up when I had the chance,” you say, moping into a pint as you watch the bidding on a Mk1 Ford Escort Mexico nudge north of the £35,000 mark. “A mate at work was trading one for milk bottle tops in 1982.” 

We know the feeling well, having missed out on some true motoring greats by waiting too late to pull the trigger, seeing our dreams slip through our fingers. So here are the motoring icons we could’ve, should’ve and would’ve bought when we had the chance – but, for one reason or another, didn’t.

There was a period when an Audi Ur-Quattro was tantalisingly close to being within my grasp. As a dyed-in-the-woollen-bobble-hat rally fan, I have always counted the fourwheel-drive Ingolstadt innovator among my favourites and it was a genuine target as I entered the working world as a cash-strapped graduate in the early 2000s. Back then, the short-wheelbase Sport was already a classic, but the mid-to late-1980s 10v was common enough to be just ‘another used Audi’, presentable examples dipping as low as £4000. 

Even so, I still needed to get my post-university finances in order. “No worries,” I thought. “I’ll wait”. Life got in the way, though, and by the time I was ready, Quattro values had sky-rocketed as buyers caught on to the pioneering performance car’s appeal. With the best cars now north of £50,000, I have most definitely missed my chance. There’s now no plan B for my Group B dream.

Ah, where to start with the glorious Ferrari F355? Most importantly, the mid-engined V8 coupé is one of the finest-handling Fezzas ever made. It was the last before the dawn of driving aids, before endless crash and emission regulations (and rightly so). It was from an era of comfort and luxury, much like now, but the key difference is that there weren’t so many electrical elements to go wrong then… Plus, it had the clickety-clack manual open-gate gearbox, one of the last manuals Ferrari made.

When I was looking a decade or so ago, I could find decent examples for £40,000. Two years ago, they were more like £70,000. Now, you’re lucky to find any below six figures and plenty of the better examples are nudging very close to £200,000. Sadly, I didn’t have a spare £40,000 then, and I don’t have a spare £100,000 now.

This doesn’t 100% hit the brief like most of the motors here, but I’m so fussy about buying cars that I rarely pine or look back with any regret about ‘missing the boat’. Except for one: the seventhgeneration Volkswagen Golf GTI, which I could easily pick up for £15,000. But that’s not the point. 

The one I would be after is the very carthat I specced and ran as a longtermer for a glorious period back in 2017-2018. It was a standard 227bhp three-door manual with next to no options and certainly not the Performance Pack that added an unnecessary extra 15bhp, beefed-up brakes and a limited-slip differential.

It was so simple, so pure (tartan cloth seats, golf-ball gearknob and all) and still so analogue-feeling, despite the rapid ascent to digital, more ‘assisted’ driving experiences and the neverending horsepower race. 

I nearly bought it at the time and instantly regretted not doing so. It would probably still be with me now, and most likely marks the last glorious chapter for the Golf GTI, given its firmer, feistier brief for the eighth generation and the inevitability of electric power for the next. Maybe I’ll dip into those classifieds, after all…

I love the Alfa Romeo SZ. I’ve never driven one, nor even sat in one. But as car magazine pages dropped open to its brutalist lines in the early 1990s, I had seldom wanted a car more. In the early 2000s, it was almost within reach. If I remember rightly, between £15,000 and £20,000 would have picked one up – too much to be sensibly affordable for me, but if one is a car obsessive, tantalisingly feasible.

I had already bought a Caterham Seven that I couldn’t really afford by borrowing all the money and not going out much. Would it be too much of a stretch to buy an SZ, even harder to look after and with unobtainable body spares? I decided it would, so I sold my Seven and bought a Ducati 748: cheaper, lovely to look at and likely to be more thrilling than any car. Nice, and I could have another now, whereas a good SZ is £70,000, so I’ll never own one.

The 1993 season was peak Williams Formula 1 to my young teenage self, all Camel fags and Mansell’s championship then Hill-mania, with the Renault V10 consistently smashing the rivals from Honda, Ford and Ferrari with its power and reliability. To this fanboy, there was no cooler road car incarnation than the Renault Clio Williams. With the gold wheels, deep-blue paint and square styling, it was the epitome of early-1990s style. Our family used to drive past a Renault dealer quite regularly, and I can still remember gawking after it in the window. It was the car that I wanted to learn to drive in.

There were three editions of it, and my personal favourite is the first, because it was just that, with 150bhp (not a sniffy amount even now) and less than a tonne in weight, along with a close-ratio gearbox from the Renault 19 diesel. As for a lot of these hot hatches, prices are now on the up: £6500 for a good one in 2015, well north of £20,000 now. Damn it!

The Lotus of my dreams was probably never as cheap as the woe-begotten version of myself sometimes likes to think, but current market forces mean it now almost certainly never will be justifiable on a road tester’s salary. I never reviewed a K-series-engined Elise when it was new. Instead, my first and lasting impression of the car was formed by later Series 2 cars with their 189bhp 1.8-litre Toyota engines. 

The first one I tested was an Elise R in about 2005, the second a 217bhp supercharged Elise SC a couple of years later. That Toyota engine gave the Elise reliability, of course, but also a real high-rev kick up the backside. All of the established handling delicacy and feel was still intact, though. In my twenties and with a lot fewer miles under my belt, no sports car I’d known before had ridden, steered or handled nearly so sublimely well. And now? A nice S2 Elise R is £30,000, while an SC is pricier still and on the way up. Perhaps they were never the sub-£20,000 temptations I imagine they might once have been. Here’s to not thinking about it.

I was so smitten that I even printed off the lead image from the advert to show my friends on the school bus. It was a 1988 BMW 325i coupé with the rare M Technic bodykit and glistening BBS alloys, which to my eyes made it an M3 Evolution. And while it had been around the block a few times, the romantically named Schwarz (which I now know as… black) paint looked to have shined up nicely. What’s more, the insurance companies didn’t all laugh me out of the building when I idly compared third-party fire and theft policies, and I started pondering the very real possibility of my first car having a naturally aspirated straight six.

Alas, it wasn’t to be: the bidding ended just north of my £2000 limit (it would now be worth about £12,000) and I ended up in another atmospheric German car, albeit one that was distinctly slower, rustier, noisier and more insectile in name and shape. Eight years later, I would finally get my old-school BMW fix in the form of a tidy E39 5 Series, but the E30 remains top of the hit list. I would even settle for a tatty 316i auto these days.

I made one of my more stupid car mistakes with the original, famous Ford ‘Cossie’. The Sierra RS Cosworth was brought to life in 1986 by Ford’s newbroom competitions boss, Stuart Turner, as a way of winning Group A saloon races across Europe. Ford made it a regular model of its popular repmobile line-up. A few were built in more specialised RS500 form – true homologation specials. Naturally, we hacks became pretty aerated about a new 150mph, 1200kg, twin-cam, three-door Ford with the biggest whale-tail spoiler you could imagine (it was needed, they said, to keep the race cars on the ground at 170mph).

Anyway, one of these original spoilered three-door cars fell into my hands as a longtermer sometime in 1986, and I had a pretty good time driving it. I did lots, from track sessions to European tours, enjoying the 204bhp (augmented to 220bhp when later models grew four-wheel drive in preparation for the rally-winning Escort Cossie) and getting used to people staring at my whale tail. I could have bought this car, but instead I got lathered about its weak gearbox, a gremlin that was soon fixed. My loss.

This was about 20 years ago. A 1965 Maserati Mistral coupé was for sale in a small town near Maranello. It was a rather beautiful blue. It needed a few jobs doing to complete a refurbishment – bumper attachment, some pieces of trim – but it was shiny and up and running. And on offer for ¤21,000. The Mistral was kind of an Italian Aston Martin DB5 but with deeper racing pedigree, its twin-cam, twin-plug straight six an enlarged and lightly modified version of that which had powered Juan Manuel Fangio to Formula 1 title glory in 1957 aboard the 250F. Never mind the live rear axle, this was sophistication, which included Lucas fuel injection. My then partner and I mulled it over, but the price was too much of a stretch. Value now? Between £140,000 and £180,000 and, more to the point, out of reach.

Think of a car: one from the late 1980s, ruthless in touring car racing, taking a predatory, monolithic form and possessing performance to match. Were it not for the image below, you would almost certainly be envisaging an E30-generation BMW M3, and look at the heights to which prices for those have climbed in the past decade. A decent one now costs at least £50,000. Long after the days of the Hakosuka and the Kenmeri, Nissan’s first modern-era Skyline GT-R was the R32 generation – very much the M3’s spiritual cousin from the far side of the world. Prices now reflect that fact, after years of these fabulous brutes going for absurdly low five-figure sums. That was never going to last.

So dominant was the R32 in Group A that it was famously dubbed Godzilla, destroying all in its path, and the road-legal homologation versions were the crowning glory of Nissan’s ambitious Project 901 – the process by which the marque intended to gain respect in the world of fast cars. It was a job well done, and the R32 could hardly have been more serious, with its immensely strong, 8000rpm RB26DETT twin-cam straight six, four-wheel drive (and steering!), quick rack and rear-propelled handling balance. V-Spec added better brakes, new BBS wheels and driveline revisions, and these cars now cost, you guessed it, north of £50,000. For your humble scribe, an opportunity well and truly squandered.

It’s the car that started a movement. Yes, yes, the Tesla Roadster is a Lotus Elise with a battery pack, but just picture the scene back in 2008, when it arrived answering a question nobody had asked. Those brave enough to part with around £90,000 got themselves behind the wheel of a distinctive, straight-line-rapid (0-60mph in sub4.0sec) car with a decent range, even by today’s dramatically improved standards, of 200 miles.

While now viewed as an icon of the electric car movement, it’s important to remember that for many years the Roadster was just a quirky glimpse of the future. At 5000 versus 3500, more Sinclair C5s were sold. So it was that prices tumbled; more so as that large but pricey battery pack degraded. For a period, the £30,000 Roadster was a reality. Today, you’re looking at a £100,000-£150,000 premium on that, depending on age and condition.

My personal car history has so far been very German and solidly built. I don’t know if it’s because or in spite of this fact that I have a strong desire to own a plastic sports car made with bits from the parts bin of a larger manufacturer. I’ve seriously looked into buying a Marcos, because a TVR is just a bit too mainstream. Similarly left-field is the Alpine Renault A310. 

The A310 has always been more affordable than the original A110, because it doesn’t have the rallying pedigree and even the early four-cylinder models were always more GT than sports car. And yet, even with the boat anchor of a Peugeot-RenaultVolvo V6, it was light, and to me it’s achingly cool. Also, it has possibly the wackiest windscreen wipers of any production car. A Renault garage near my parents’ place left one to gather moss outside for several months but wouldn’t sell it. I enquired about a freshly restored one that was up for £10,000, but I was too slow, and then I bought a boring Porsche 944 instead. A310s are so rare that when they do come up, sellers, due to the recent classic car boom, just tend to pluck a number out of thin air.