DRIVES
Testing, testing
RICHARD LANE
Lane simply couldn’t walk away from a chance encounter with an EK9 Type R
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.