Ok, this should put an end to this "What's the best..." type questions:
Go to this post. Download and unzip the .rar file. (Use WinRAR which is also a free download if you don't already have it.) Be sure to thank
TornadoAlley for his work in compiling this too. 👍
While this is the NTSC U/C file, the car cycles aren't that much different between PAL & NTSC, there's just a few naming & colour discrepancies, however, this Excel spreadsheet is filterable in an enormous amount of ways.
e.g. Want to know best car for under 28000? Click on the filter icon next to "Price" column. Select "Less than" and enter 28000. The spreadsheet will now eliminate values above 28000. Click the filter icon again and select "Sort Largest to Smallest". It's also possible to do multiple filters, so for example having sorted by price you could also sort "Power" by largest to smallest in the same way. Now you can find a car that's under 28000, with the most power. The sheet will also tell you on what game day and what gameweek the car is available.
You will have to bear in mind that "Best" is a totally subjective thing, what you consider best may not be what I consider best.
You can grab a 4WD Skyline for under 28000Cr, a Corvette Grand-Sport, various RX-7s or an S2000, but it's totally dependent on the game day. If you've done some of the licence tests, this will've used gamedays and therefore what's in the used car lots will have changed from what was there on Day 1. (Definitely highly advisable to do licence tests
before racing, even though some folks view them as a chore that stops you entering races, they're actually designed to teach you some of the race driving basics, and if you take the time to try & Silver or Gold each test rather than settling for Bronze, you'll learn how to shave 1/10ths off each corner and thus seconds off laptimes when it comes to real races, and you'll win some extra prizecars to boot!)
It's totally pointless for us to advise you that you can pick up a 350HP TVR Cerbera Speed Six '97 for under 28000Cr, if you haven't learned the basics of driving. If you can't make consistent clean laps in something underpowered like a Miata (which is a great car for learning driving basics in) without going off the road, clanging into the AI or rubbing the barriers in every turn, then the TVR is just going to exacerbate the issue, and encourages bad driving habit such as an over-reliance on power & straightline speed to win races, something which will seem irrelevant to begin with, but when you reach GT World Championship and you can't simply overpower you opponents for the win, you'll find it very frustrating to try and learn good racing technique in an LMP or Group C racer and will have to go back to basics. (This is an enormously common mistake and the reason why the most commonly asked question on the GT4 board is "How do I beat GTWC?" along with various rants about how x car & y car are crap because they can't win it, except the driver has overlooked the 1 obvious thing... it's often not the car, but the
driver's fault!)