Saturday morning. Autumn light hitting the freeway in that way that makes everything look half-fictional, like a memory you’ll replay later with different colors. We left Temecula with the kind of restless buzz you only get when the day ahead feels larger than life. Porsches tore past us on the 101—930s, Carreras, the occasional GT3—the sound bouncing off the concrete like a preview for what was waiting at the end of the drive. We weren’t just going to an event. We were driving toward something staged, orchestrated, cinematic—an intersection of our obsessions: cinema and machines built for speed.

There’s something almost mischievous about pulling into Universal Studios and writing your name on the backlot security sheet. Like sneaking in where you shouldn’t be, but being invited all the same. The gates opened, and suddenly you’re walking streets you’ve seen a thousand times before, though never quite like this. Storefronts, alleys, facades—sets that have lived entire fictional lives—now doubling as the backdrop for Stuttgart’s finest. It was like watching two worlds collide without flinching. Film and motorsport, make-believe and engineering, both telling stories in their own languages.

The cars themselves were curated like a gallery: air-cooled classics lined up against brick façades that had once stood in for New York, modern GT cars waiting in the shadows of Western saloons. Everything in its place, but still alive, raw, breathing gasoline. To walk through it with a camera on your hip was to step into an alternate universe. Not quite Hollywood, not quite Le Mans, but a place in between—where fiction and horsepower were castmates in the same scene. It was, for lack of a better word, intoxicating.

By the end of the day, your legs ache, your memory card is full, and your brain is still trying to sort out what it just experienced. It wasn’t just a car show. It wasn’t just a set tour. It was a near-perfect Saturday where cinema and motorsport braided together, leaving behind something that felt more like a film than an event. Walking back through the backlot gates, the sun already dropping behind the hills, you couldn’t help but feel lucky. Lucky to have been there, camera in hand, watching two of your obsessions dance in the same light.