When a few owners stopped for coffee and pastries, we did too, and I sipped the best espresso doppio I’ve had in years. Talk about quintessential Italian life! But the reverie proved short-lived. In my overcaffeinated, sleep-deprived state, I soon made a math error that cost us a few seconds in the next average speed trial.

After the first sector, we regrouped with the rest of the Green cars and got caught behind Ferraris driving interminably slowly on a gravel section right during a time trial. (Ahead of us, last year’s Green winner Mirco Magni sacrificed a whole stage to let a gap grow. Later, he explained that the penalty for missing the time by five seconds is the same as for five minutes, something we never located in the English rulebook translation.)

That night, we got a miraculous five hours of sleep, but I still woke up concerned about our rankings. Sure enough, we’d done well in scoring but also earned two “TC” penalties. I slipped behind the wheel of the Polestar, but today we decided to stop for espresso early in the morning, as we’d learned to enjoy ourselves the day before. This time, the vintage cars caught up with us, and I sipped my desperately needed caffeine while watching as a support crew swapped out fouled spark plugs on a Bugatti Type 37.

We then hustled to keep up with a veritable fleet of the open-wheel Bugattis and Alfa Romeos while driving up one of the most incredible mountain roads I’ve ever been on. In the Polestar, we could have easily sprinted away, but we instead sat transfixed by the sight, sound, and smell of tall tires squealing, engines roaring and belching smoke, and drivers and passengers leaning into turns as hard as possible. Really, these century-old cars drove harder than the support crews, eventually getting bound up into clumps on the tight roads west of Cervia.