Things that make a car more "sporty" to me:
Convertible
Manual transmission
Decent handling, no wallowing
Some power, but this is not critical to me, it could be an MGBGT or whatever.
The power of many modern sports cars is simply unusable except in spurts, on ramps, etc. Usually in an on ramp, even my GTI gets going faster than traffic in a couple seconds. I can light it off from a stop light, yay, whatever, but it's not what makes it fun to me.