As a born-and-bred New Yorker who didn’t get my driver’s license until the age of 26, it still surprises me to report that I’ve been writing about cars on and off for the last decade. But I’m always the lifestyle magazine writer at the auto event, which means I’m forever the guy at the Trekkie convention who digs the movies but hasn’t yet learned to speak Klingon. As I confirmed my travel plans, I knew I would once again find myself playing the car enthusiast minnow in the sea of auto-obsessed sharks. So I did a little reading, rewatched some racing docs, and talked shop with my dad. I’d been warned that most of the events of the week called for either “Garden Party” or “California Chic,” but having heard of neither dress code before, I just packed every piece of clothing I owned that reminded me of Paul Newman.

After checking into my hotel, I visited the Quail Lodge & Golf Club, where a car show of the same name would be held the next day. There I got a sneak peek at the newest offering McLaren would be unveiling the following day: the Solus GT, a car that had first appeared in the “Gran Turismo” video game. The company whose car had just made my afternoon drive feel like a racing simulation is building 25 cars inspired by the digital car that gamers have been driving on their screens for years — life imitating art imitating life. I caught up with Bruno Senna — race car driver, McLaren brand ambassador, and nephew to racing legend Ayrton Senna, who described for me his experience as a test driver for the vehicle. “It’s quite a driving experience,” he said, wearing a big smile. Then he added, with a wistful look in his eye, “I just hope these things don’t stay in their garages.”

The cars on display radiated a depth of both care and pockets. The closer you got to each vehicle, the higher the odds you caught someone talking about their painstaking efforts to track down parts, keep the car pristine, and get it all the way out to Pebble Beach in one piece. These are people who spend their fortunes in an effort to stop their vehicles from deteriorating with age, and then spend even more to transport them to events where they’re judged on their very ability to defy the passage of time. Patrolling these grounds at the end of a trip largely dedicated to the glories of preservation, it occurred to me that Car Week is the grand collision of the drives to both outrun death and behave like you only live once.

The next morning, I headed north to SFO — this time in a McLaren 720S Spider. If their GT was the ride to introduce this rookie to the hooks of supercar driving, this is the one designed to dig them in all the way. Maybe it was just the rose-colored driving glasses I’d acquired during Monterey Car Week, but this was a perfect day of driving if ever there were one. It started off in foggy, mid-50s weather in Carmel Valley before bouncing out to the Pacific Coast Highway. The clouds departed, the temperatures rose, the crew neck came off, the top went down. I activated track mode and seemed to feel every nuance of the road even more clearly. I went into the turns a touch faster, opened up on the straightaways a bit more. The Maps app on my phone kept demanding I take the 101 instead, but I just shouted back in protest and skipped every exit that would’ve made the drive a moment shorter.