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. Aged nine, I could quote the 0-60mph time and price of anything vaguely interesting with a success rate of 90% – higher if it was a 911. If my dad was reading the papers on the weekend, I’d sidle up, mag in hand, and pester for an impromptu fact test. As for most of us, car stats were the original obsession. 

For a grown-up road tester, the obsession is no longer, as you might imagine, with those same statistics, although we do try to screw the absolute best times out of performance cars and that requires determination. Something that now matters just as much is simply getting behind the wheel of as many cars as possible.

It’s harvesting those subjective impressions, building up the inventory. Pokémon on an epic scale: gotta catch ’em all. The analogy extends to the game’s ‘evolution chains’. As little Charmander begets Charmeleon begets Charizard (apologies to non-millennials), it isn’t enough to drive a BMW M240i; you also must be au fait with the M2 and M2 CSL.

Obviously there’s a degree of professional thoroughness at play here. To describe the steering in an Omoda 5 as purgatory, you need to have driven a Nissan Qashqai and a Kia Sportage. If you get the chance to have a go in a Ruf CTR Anniversary, it greatly helps to have pedalled a 964 911 Turbo and a McLaren 600LT. I suppose the ability to offer an opinion on a Cisitalia 202, a toilet-spec DS or a Prodrive P25 also gives your typical car journalist a warm, fuzzy feeling. You’re tapping into the physical manifestations of an immensely storied industry. 

All this is on my mind because last week I got to tick off a very rare and interesting car. I was in Worcestershire to see an early BMW 320 (among the earliest, in fact – 1975) for up an upcoming story. It’s co-owned by Thom Williams and Neil Phipps (obsessives, obviously), and while it is a lovely thing, it wasn’t the 320 that had me sweaty-palmed. It was Neil’s Honda Civic Type R, tucked in the corner of the lock-up. He saw me fawning. Wanna have a go? Er, yes, mate. 

If you don’t ‘get’ EK9s it can be tricky to convey just how special they are. Honda went to town for the ur-Type R: ported heads for 114bhp per litre; a redline close to 9000rpm; a seam-welded monocoque; a titanium gearknob; double wishbones (the later, UK-sold EP3 didn’t get this); and an LSD for the front axle. Red Recaros.

Neil’s car also weighs only a tonne. It makes a Golf R feel like an S-Class with its toggle-switch turn-in and a motor screaming to the heavens. You’re a big metal hummingbird, firing yourself this way and that, using controls that are deeply intuitive. It’s a revelation, a big box ticked and yet another incipient obsession to keep tabs on.