He wanted to know if I could give him a ride to school one day in my Lamborghini Countach. It so intrigued me that I called the kid, of course speaking to his mother first, and said, why don't we do this next week?

So I drove out to where the kid lived and picked him up. Then we waited until the opportune time, when most of the buses are in front of the school and all the kids are hanging out and we pull up in front, the doors go up into the sky, the kid goes, ''Bye uncle Jay!'' And I go, ''OK, Billy, take care, I'll pick you up next week and we'll go driving.''

And of course all his friends' mouths are hanging open. It was hysterical.

That story sums up the appeal of Lamborghini and especially that of the Countach. I loved Lamborghini as a marque before I loved the Countach as a car.

I had a Miura and an Espada before I got the Countach. I got it for the same reason anyone would buy a Countach; it's the ultimate expression of Lamborghini at the time. In the '80s it was just about the fastest car you could buy.

Italian supercars stood out at that time, too, because smog and pollution controls on American cars robbed them of so much power. Corvettes didn't have very much horsepower at all at that time.

The car I bought was just a year old and didn't have very much on the clock; it was about half the price of what it cost new. So I grabbed it and I've been driving it for 23 years.

When a car leaves the dealership, I never like to go back there. I like to do my own servicing and work on the car myself. I enjoy that part of it. My Countach hasn't been any more of a problem than any other car, in fact it's a lot less complicated in some ways. There's no fuel injection, for example.

I remember reading in the '70s that somebody saw a Lamborghini parked on the street. It was sort of dirty and had mud on it and there was a crushed up bag of crisps on the seat and a Coke can on the floor.

This writer thought, fantastic, here's someone using a Lamborghini like anyone would use an ordinary car. And I remember reading that and thinking, well that's fantastic! It turns out that car was Rod Stewart's Lamborghini.

I've had Rod on the show a few times and we have become friends. Unlike me, he feels no compulsion to keep his cars and changes them quite a lot. But we are both passionate about Lamborghinis.

The Countach is not a light car, in any sense. There's no airbags; the windows go down just enough to get a McDonald's single hamburger through. Not a double, just a single patty. You have to open the door when you come to a tollbooth.

It handles very nicely but there's only so much you can do on the public road.

You have to manhandle it to enjoy it. It's the kind of car that a lot of guys would say they don't want to sit in traffic working that clutch. I enjoy that. That's how I get my exercise. I like that mechanical feedback. There's no traction control, there's no ABS. There's a big engine, a very clever gearbox and it handles and drives OK.

I feel special in my Lamborghinis. That's what Lamborghini represents if you're 60 or 12 years old. That's why I gave the kid who wrote to me a ride in the Countach. It reminded me of the guy who let me sit in his Jaguar when I was nine. That guy and that moment was what got me into cars.

So I can relate to this kid who got caught in this huge lie about riding around in this car and asked if I could help him out. I said sure, I'm in show business, I know about lying. I'll help you out.

Maybe one day he'll be as nuts about cars as I am and have his own Lamborghini.