Testing, testing

Cars hijack our obsessive impulses in ways that range from the amusing to the fulfilling to the potentially unhealthy.

- RICHARD LANE

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 interwar 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.