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There is a price to be paid for performance, but it might not be as scary as you think.

Sure, you can drop $238,500 on a wild, grumbling, 603-horsepower Mercedes-Benz SL65 AMG roadster. That thundering V-12 under the hood will rock your world and the neighbourhood.

But you'll also be paying $395 for every single horse.

And you can live the dream in a $174,600 all-wheel-drive Porsche 911 Turbo Cabriolet — 480 horsepower and it screams, "Look at me!"

But you'll pay $364 per horsepower.

Or you can buy a 260-horsepower Chevrolet Cobalt SS for a list price of $25,345. It's turbocharged, it's pretty quick in the corners and super-eager on a drag strip. Chevy even sells it in canary yellow.

All that for $97 per horsepower, or less. You read that right. The $97 number is based on the manufacturer's suggested retail price — the sticker price. But you can do better.

Right now, that Cobalt SS comes with a $4,000 factory-to-dealer rebate for anyone who uses the dealer to shop for non-GMAC financing. Do a deal with payments stretched to just under six years, and the $4,000 is yours.

Then, based on figures supplied by pricing service www.carcostcanada.com , throw in another $500 in the form of a Holiday Cash factor-to-dealer rebate. That takes the sticker down to $20,845 and voilà — your price per horsepower is 80 bucks. That's cheap for a coupe with the racy feel of the Cobalt SS.

And there are lots of deals like that out there. We went looking for them, too, to put together a list of 10 budget performance cars. So they all had to be dressed with a sticker price of less than $30,000. The average transaction price of a new car in Canada is about $31,000, so under $30,000 puts all these cars squarely in the mainstream.

Then we went shopping for a better price. It is a capitalist world, after all. If we're doing a list of cars that provide cheap thrills, we want the deals — the best deals.

Some of the cars here are real howlers, and I mean that in a good way. That is, if you're a gearhead, if you have gasoline coursing through your veins, these will make you howl with joy. The Cobalt SS is on that list, as is its sibling, the HHR SS.

The latter, in fact, combines speedy thrills with a thoroughly practical body style. Basically, the HHR SS is a super-fast compact station wagon with cool seats, nifty-looking gauges — including a turbo boost gauge — and shocking acceleration.

For pure style, there is the Mini Cooper S. For pure horsepower, it does not deliver the best bang for the buck ($174 per horsepower), but it grabs eyeballs and performance-wise it's not exactly a slouch.

Volkswagen's GTI is an interesting case. It's very refined and looks it. The styling is clean, unadorned and elegant for a pocket rocket.

The Mazdaspeed3? Now here's a car for a price you can sink your teeth into. Remember, Mazda is bringing in a whole new, reinvented Mazda3 in just weeks, which means the Speed3 is rapidly getting dated.

What happens when a car gets dated? Manufacturers often cut prices and slap on the deals. That's the case here. Mazda lowered the price of the Speed3 by about $2,000 for the 2009 model year. At $29,360, its sticker slipped just under our cutoff point.

Add in a nice little $500 rebate reported by carcostcanada.com and you have a 263-hp highway hound that will do 0-100 km/h in just over six seconds. The Speed3 can carve corners, too.

Now some of you out there are going to say this pursuit of performance is both juvenile and irresponsible. Maybe juvenile. But what exactly is wrong with trying to stay young at heart? Our nanny culture is bent on trying to strip every ounce of fun out of life and, with apologies to Dylan Thomas, that's a trend worth raging against.

The irresponsible charge is another matter. These may be sporty, fast cars here, but their price tags will not bludgeon your budget and all of them — because we are in every instance talking about some sort of smallish car — get pretty good fuel economy.

That's good for the planet — reduced emissions, less strain on limited resources — and makes it possible to enjoy these cars without fearing for a spike at the fuel pump.

We have here, then, a list of 10 cars with enough power and handling to be entertaining and they all have price tags that shout out "Performance for the money!"

I hope I never grow up, entirely.