[onewhippedpuppy]

Yasin, don't ever apologize for posting pictures of your 323 GTX! I love those things.

Eric, my first nice car was a 1993 240SX coupe. Really great little car that took a ton of abuse from me as a teen, I put about 50k on that car and sold it to a friend of my wife's who put another 50k-ish on it before neglecting her oil and destroying the engine. I would LOVE a properly built Silvia replica with an SR20DET, the KA24DE was really the only low point of the car.

Some interesting feedback here. Focus ST is a lot of fun, I daily drove one for a year and enjoyed it. Several references to the Mini and Fiat 500, I've owned several Minis and while they were fun, they were unreliable and sucked to work on. I'm yet to read anything good about maintaining a 500, it's always sounded like they are true to every Italian car cliche. I have heard that the Abarth is great fun to drive though!

I'm not sure what the price range would be, but other potential contenders in the hot hatch world would be a used Focus RS, Golf R, CLA45 AMG, GLA45 AMG, Volvo V40 R-Design, or TT-RS. New contenders that I don't think have been mentioned are the Civic SI or Type R or Hyundai Veloster N.