The last time Jason Statham was at Willow Springs, a twisty, rolling, serpent of a racetrack deep in Southern California's Mojave Desert, things were a bit less, let's just say, exciting. The English action-film star had been summoned to practice performance driving, in Mini Coopers, for The Italian Job, along with his costars, including Mark Wahlberg (who ralphed, perhaps due to a hangover) and Charlize Theron (who, being the lone woman, was given the privilege of piloting the only car that had any pep: a supercharged Mini Cooper S). For the rest of the group, it was "performance driving", in your basic four-cylinder Mini, an experience roughly analogous, thrillwise, to commuting to work on the interstate.

"It was the most lame thing you could ever imagine," says Statham, stepping out of a trailer into the chill of a January morning. He is slim but solid-looking, showing no outward signs of the "blur of toxins" he says he ingested over the holidays after five alcohol-free months while shooting his next film in Montreal. "They made me put a helmet on. I could windsurf quicker than this thing. I was not a happy man."

"Today," I tell him, "should be a little different."

Willow Springs claims to be the oldest purpose-built road course in America. Its nine-turn, 2.5-mile road course has sat here on these dusty desert hills since 1953, much of that time under the stewardship of Bill Huth, who is rumored to have won the joint in a poker game. A second, more technical 1.8-mile course known as "the Streets" was added in 1985, and a shifter-kart track followed a bit later. Huth has turned two of his car tracks over to us for the day, but that's not even the best part. The best part would be the Lamborghinis that recently arrived via tractor-trailer: a canary-yellow Gallardo (retail price: $198,000) and its fearsome big brother, a $372,200 tangerine-orange Murciélago LP640 (that number if you're wondering, refers to horsepower).