In the original Top Gear series, the Stig test-drove cars, set lap times and trained up celebrities for segments. The fact he was a professional racing driver meant viewers could not quibble over whether he was qualified to set the bar for the presenters and guests. Many believed Harris' driving skills, as well as those of co-presenter Sabine Schmitz, had rendered the Stig's role obsolete, but the rather formidable looking man in white remains on the show to this day.
Racing driver and stunt man Ben Collins decided to come out as the Stig in , and consequently lost the job after seven years doing it.
A legal battle began between the BBC and Collins' publisher kicked off when he decided to release an autobiography called The Man in the White Suit, which apparently broke the secrecy-based terms of his employment. Collins was in turn replaced by another White Stig, and as of today nobody knows who this one is. In it he said: "The whole point of the Stig is the mystique—the bizarre characteristics he has, the wonderment created about what he might think, feel, do or look like.
The Stig wasn't meant to be a hit with the audience. He was just meant to be a test driver to drive featured sports cars around the shows test track very fast. The anonymous driver became a legend on the show after Jeremy Clarkson started introducing him each week with different comic sayings. His face was blocked by a helmet, so not even the celebs who appeared on the show knew who he was.
Now that we all know who he is, Top Gear will change. The moment in the show when the Stig drives the car will not be the highlight it used to be. There is currently another white-suited Stig whose identity remains a secret. Some also say that he has two sets of knees, webbed buttocks, a digital face and that if you tune your FM radio to So when Ben Collins - a man no one had ever heard of, despite all the speculation about the secret racing driver being someone famous - outed himself as the Stig, publishing a book called The Man in the White Suit in , it was a huge story.
The myth and mystique of the Stig had been built up over many years, and magnified by the success of the Top Gear TV show, hosted most famously by Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond, which was, for several years, the most-watched non-fiction television program… in the world as Clarkson would bray it.
The Stig's identity had been exposed once before, in the form of a newspaper scoop, back in , when Top Gear was only really a big deal in the UK, rather than worldwide. Clarkson and the his good friend Andy Wilman, the producer and genius behind the show, came up with the idea for the Stig when they launched the version of Top Gear we know today - featuring a racetrack, a live studio audience and plenty of crazy races and stunts - in The two of them wanted a professional racing driver to set fast, and comparable, times on the Top Gear test track, in a segment known as Power Laps, but they struggled to find one who was any good at speaking on camera, so they decided to make him a mute in a suit instead.
The first Stig, who wore a black suit, was Perry McCarthy, a not particularly famous F1 driver , who went to huge amounts of trouble to maintain his anonymity, wearing his helmet and suit at all times and even putting on fake accents when required to speak.
Doing this while maintaining his anonymity was yet another challenge for McCarthy, until his identity was revealed by a Sunday newspaper article in January The Black Stig was then killed off by the show in the first episode of Series 3, after driving off the deck of an aircraft carrier into the ocean at high speed.
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