The Man in the White Suit. Ben Collins
rushes he wanted and hoped I did some good times the other day.’
‘That’s so typical. I think you equalled Perry’s best time on your second lap, and your best lap was over a second faster. Wilman was straight on the phone to the office and was like, “Boys, we’ve got a new Stig …”’
The Stig was the show’s faceless racing driver who tested everything from exotic supercars to family saloons around Top Gear’s track, setting fast lap times to gauge their performance. Dressed in black and hidden behind a blackout helmet, he looked like Darth Vader’s racing twin.
The vital component of The Stig’s aura was anonymity. No one ever saw his face, knew his name or heard him speak. When Perry McCarthy, the chattiest racing driver on the planet, revealed that he was the driver behind the mask after Series 2, his days were numbered. Shortly after I took over, I observed the fate awaiting me if I ever broke that rule.
Black Stig, or rather someone dressed like him, was filmed being strapped into a Jaguar XJS to attempt a speed record aboard the aircraft-carrier HMS Invincible. A dummy Stig was then sent screaming down the launch pad, aided by the pressurised steam catapult used for launching Sea Harriers.
Stig ‘missed his braking point’. Car and driver crashed into the North Sea, never to be seen again …
With him out of the way, it was my turn in the sandpit. But I knew that a character born of the media would inevitably die by it; that a single slip-up would lead to the catapult. Black Stig lasted a year on the show; maybe I could hold out for two. Carpe Diem. If it only lasted a day, I was determined to make it a good one.
I vowed to take The Stig in the White Suit to a new level of secrecy and hold out for as long as possible. I made my own rules: never park in the same place twice, never talk to anyone outside the ‘circle’ and keep a balaclava on until I was eight miles clear of the location, and certain that no one was following.
My golden rule was never to appear in the white suit without my helmet on. Conjecture was nothing without proof, and nothing short of photographic, tangible evidence could prove who I was. I sterilised my gear, left every trace of Ben Collins – my phone, my wallet and so on – locked in the car, then hid the keys. When the Sunday Times raided my changing room and sifted through my gear, the only information they gleaned was that The Stig wore size 10 shoes.
At work I hid behind a mask. At home I lied to everyone, including my friends and family, about what I was doing.
To me, The Stig epitomised the ultimate quest: no challenge too great, no speed too fast. He had to look cool and have attitude, so I ditched the crappy racing overalls the BBC gave me and acquired some Alpinestars gear and a Simpson helmet.
Apart from unparalleled skill behind the wheel, The Stig was rumoured to have paranormal abilities and webbed buttocks, to urinate petrol and be top of the CIA’s Most Wanted list. There was only one possible hitch: I had never been a tame racing driver.
* * *
After forty minutes the balaclava began to itch like hell. The only place to give my head a break was the mothballed room Jim Wiseman had shown me where the test pilots used to change for pre-flight. It was more like a jail cell.
Paint flaked off the damp, yellow-stained walls; the red-painted concrete floor had survived an earthquake and the windows were too high to see out of. It was furnished minimally – with a rump-numbing, standard locker-room issue wooden bench. My only company was a plump beetle that I named Reg. He usually made an appearance mid-morning and scrambled across the pock-marked floor.
I waited there for hours on end, to be summoned to go ballistic on the track in whatever vehicle was lined up for filming. Food was brought to me and eaten in solitary confinement. In between eating and driving, two of my favourite pursuits, I busied myself reading books or doing press-ups. I pestered racing teams on the phone and drifted off into the recesses of my brain. It was like The Shawshank Redemption, minus the shower scene.
Only Andy Wilman, Wiseman and a couple of the producers knew who I was. I was just a voice behind a mask. Even the presenters were in the dark. When I coached the celebrity guests, none of them knew my name. They never saw my face. My helmet always stayed on with the visor shut.
It didn’t take long to slip into my new routine.
It would begin with a knock at the door. The world turned Polaroid as I pulled on my helmet. The familiar scent of its resin bond filled my nostrils and the wadding pressed against my cheeks. I paced down the hall and on to the airfield to receive instructions from the director. People stopped in their tracks and stared at me like I was E.T.
The director swept his curly locks behind his ears and extended his hands, framing a square with his thumbs and forefingers as he breathlessly visualised the scene he was looking for.
‘What we would like you to do, if you can, Stig, is pull away really fast. And spin the wheels. Can you do that?’
The cameraman, a North Face advocate with white blond hair, crouched like a rabbit six inches from a Porsche 911’s rear wheel, evidently focused on the hub. ‘Hi, I’m Ben Joiner,’ he said. ‘Am I all right here?’
I nodded. I was hardly being asked to skim the barriers at Daytona.
I red-lined the Porker, flipped the clutch and vanished in a haze of smoke.
The radio crackled. ‘Cut, cut, cut … Wonderful. Let’s do that again, but this time look at the camera first and then go!’
We did it again. And again. And again. Filming took … time.
I began to get my head around the compromise between fast driving and spectacular driving for TV. Sometimes it overlapped – a fast lap could be as exciting to behold on the screen as on the stopwatch, but that was rare.
I studied the edit inside a minivan with James, a dour young Brummie who received the footage hot from the track, tapped a whirlwind of inputs on to his hieroglyphic keyboard, and deftly dissected it into a meaningful sequence for broadcast.
To enhance the viewing experience – and to keep my new friend James at bay – I threw in some wheelspins and lashings of lurid cornering to complement the more sedate looking but faster driving shots.
The Porsche was down to set a time, but it was pissing with rain and the track was flooding in the straights. Just completing a 140mph lap without spinning on to the turf had been an accomplishment.
Andy Wilman wandered down and collared me. ‘Can’t you do something?’
‘What did you have in mind? A good time is out of the question. The car aquaplanes from second right up to fifth on the straights.’
‘The old Black Stig was a dab hand round this place, y’know. Amazing car control in the wet. Just do something. Something … interesting.’
Andy could already push my buttons like a jukebox.
As if by magic, the eight-year-old in my brain had a great idea. The Follow Through corner was named when Andy designed the layout of the Top Gear track with Lotus test driver Gavan Kershaw from Naaaarwich (which some people know as Norwich). ‘The cars will be going bloody fast through this bit,’ Gavan explained. ‘You wouldn’t want to go off, that’s for sure.’
Andy is rumoured to have got quite excited at that point. ‘You mean if you went off you’d shit yourself and follow through?’
I asked Jim Wiseman to reposition the Follow Through cameraman. I’d decided not to share my plan with him. If things went wrong, I could always blame the weather.
I pounded the Porker around the lap as per normal. As I exited the Hammerhead chicane the adrenalin began boosting. As every gear-change propelled me closer to the money shot, I started to wonder if this was such a good idea.
The rain slashed across the windscreen, I turned right into the Follow Through and buried the throttle. The Porker fired several warning signals but I was able