Cars hijack our obsessive impulses in ways that range from the amusing to the fulfilling to the potentially unhealthy. Sourcing, say, a door card from a specific model year for your Fiat X1/9 is niche behaviour but nothing unusual for people like us.
Higher-calibre nerdery might lead you to seriously investigate period-correct Blaupunkt head units for a car you don’t own. Feeling your way to just the right damper settings for a wintry Cadwell Park from the thousands of permutations that modern coilovers offer?
That way madness lies, but we lap it up. And I can’t be the only one who has trawled Autotrader for a Land Rover Discovery 4 in Aintree Green without, crucially, the tinted glass and without, more crucially, having a place to keep it.
But even all this is small fry in the world of car obsessiveness. Did you know there’s a man in Arizona with a collection of hand-built 11th- to 16th-scale replicas of inter-war and mid-century Lincolns, Chevrolets and Dodges? Ernie Adams – Mr Dwarf Car – beats the panels himself on an English wheel and all his creations actually run.
Former Top Gear script editor Richard Porter preaches the car-trivia gospel. People buy his books (books!) to learn, for example, that the special-edition Colorado of 1993 was the only Mk3 Vauxhall Cavalier to come with a CD player as standard.
There’s also a man, Mark Torok, who runs a sizeable ‘Skoda orphanage’ saving transition-era models of the 1990s from scrap. God’s work.
Now clearly these represent car-obsessing as a lifestyle. Most people typically hop from one rabbit hole to the next, keeping a few on the go and reopening previous flings, but the point is that Planet Car is stupidly easy to get hooked on.
Autocar readers are often groomed for these tendencies. The road test results section in the back of this mag is manna from heaven when you’re too young to have a licence so need to get your kicks vicariously. There it all is: no-bullshit data, each figure painting a picture, every tenth mattering terribly.