Enthusiasts search at £208k. The highest scores sit under £50k.

Two numbers from the Bull Market database sit awkwardly next to each other. The average search run on the site has a budget ceiling of £208,500. The average score across the 57 library cars with an entry price above £250,000 is 56.5. Drop to the 77 cars that start under £25,000 and the average score climbs to 64.2.

Put plainly: people arrive looking at the top of the market, and the top of the market is where the scoring model is least enthusiastic. Of 120 searches logged, only 22 had a ceiling of £50,000 or below. Forty-seven were above £150,000.

The score curve runs backwards to the price curve

Grouping all 478 scored cars in the library by the bottom of their price band gives a clean, monotonic slide:

• Under £25k (77 cars): average score 64.2. 49 rated early in the cycle, just 1 late or peaked.
• £25k to £50k (95 cars): average score 64.1. 68 early, 1 late or peaked.
• £50k to £100k (132 cars): average score 62.8. 68 early, 13 late or peaked.
• £100k to £250k (117 cars): average score 59.2. 63 early, 12 late or peaked.
• Over £250k (57 cars): average score 56.5. Only 13 early, and 15 already late or peaked.

The averages move by roughly eight points top to bottom, which is meaningful but not dramatic. The cycle split is the more interesting column. In the two cheapest bands, 64 to 72 percent of cars are flagged as early, and almost nothing has peaked. Above £250,000, fewer than a quarter are early and more than a quarter have already had their run.

Why that happens

Expensive cars have been watched by everyone for longer. A limited-run halo car is identified as collectible on the day it is announced, so the appreciation story is priced in before the first owner takes delivery. There is nothing left to discover. A well-sorted coupe that was merely a good used car five years ago has no such head start, which is exactly the gap the finder is built to catch.

Where the high scores actually are

Below £25,000, the standouts are the Honda S2000 AP2 facelift at 83 with a £12,000 to £22,000 band, the Nissan 370Z Nismo manual at 80.4, and the Porsche Cayman S 987.2 at 79.2. All three are rated early. The full band sits in the under £25k collection.

Between £25,000 and £50,000 the library goes higher still. The Audi R8 V10 gated manual tops the entire library band at 83.2, with the Cayman 987.2 S manual at 82.2, the R8 V8 4.2 gated manual at 79.9 and the BMW M3 E92 manual at 79.8. See the £25k to £50k collection for the rest.

The top of the market is thinner, not broken

Above £250,000 the ceiling is still there, it is just harder to reach. The Ferrari 599 GTB Fiorano manual scores 78 and is rated early at £550,000 to £750,000, driven by how few manual 599s were built. The Porsche 911 R scores 69 but is rated mid cycle, which is the more typical shape up there. If that is your bracket, the over £250k collection is worth filtering by cycle position rather than by score alone.

The honest caveats

A score is an assessment of setup, not a forecast. Cheap cars are cheap for reasons, and running costs do not scale down with purchase price: a £7,000 engine rebuild is an inconvenience on a £300,000 car and a write-off on a £16,000 one. Condition spread is also far wider at the bottom, so the gap between the best and worst example of the same model can exceed the gap between models. And 120 searches is a small sample. Treat the direction as informative and the exact numbers as provisional.

What to do with this

If your ceiling is high, the useful question is not what you can afford but where in the cycle the thing you can afford is sitting. If your ceiling is modest, the data says you are shopping in the healthiest part of the library, not the leftovers. Either way the early in the cycle collection and the manual collection are the two filters that move the score most.

Run your own numbers. Set your real budget, market and criteria and see what the finder returns for you at bullmarketcars.com/find. It takes about a minute and the results are specific to your bracket, not the averages above.

Informational analysis only. This is not financial advice and classic and modern collector cars can fall in value as well as rise.