Great Cars Under $1000 – All-Star Profiles – Nissan 240sx

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One of the most popular platforms on the tuning market. Whether you’re looking for road racing, autocross, drift, drag, or just plain fast, the Nissan 240sx is one of the best giant killers out there.

Introduced in 1989, the 240sx has everything a great sports car should have. Rear-wheel drive, independent suspension, disc brakes, and a lightweight chassis. Extremely popular in its native Japan, the 240sx has been well known to many for years as an ideal tuning platform. The main drawback though, as seen by many, is that when it arrived on our shores in the US, Nissan loaded these cars with the KA24DE, which is of course a perfectly decent engine and has a lot of tune-up, but considering that in Japan they were selling with the much more popular and more powerful SR20DET, it’s hard not to feel like we were a little cheated.

Fortunately for us, though, one of the best parts about the 240sx and most Nissans is that they’re incredibly good candidates for engine swaps. The most popular swap is the turbocharged SR20DET, but people are also stocking up on everything from Skyline engines to even Corvette LS1s. The 240sx is just one of those chassis that can not only handle the new found power, but also maintain its excellent handling characteristics. Also because the 240sx is such a popular platform for tuning, there is basically an unlimited supply of parts, from slight mods to full camber race setups.

Tips for buying one: The first generation cars will be the ones that will fall in the sub $1000 dollar price range and there are still plenty of unmodified cars to be found cheaply. Keep in mind though, these cars are still sought after and a clean chassis will command a decent price. A good tip for those of you looking to make a trade is to find an unfinished project that someone else left in the dust. Doing this can save you a lot of cash on parts and maybe even give you a nice head start on getting the car where you want it to be faster. For those of you with performance in mind, I would recommend staying away from convertible models as they tend to be much heavier and have less chassis rigidity.

So if you’re looking for your next tuner project, it’s hard to go wrong with a 240sx, no matter how many there are, you can always have the opportunity to make it your own and have something that’s fun to drive and different.

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