Who is The Stig? The three real drivers behind Top Gear's masked racer

The Stig is the masked, mute test driver who sets lap times on Top Gear. Over more than twenty years, three real racing drivers have worn that suit: Perry McCarthy, Ben Collins and Phil Keen. Each man's identity was meant to stay secret forever, and each lost it in a different way.

Why the mask went on in the first place

When Top Gear relaunched in October 2002, presenter Jeremy Clarkson and producer Andy Wilman wanted a professional racing driver on the show, but could not find one who was also comfortable talking on camera. Their solution was a character who never spoke and never showed his face, built as a joke on how a racing helmet makes any driver anonymous. The BBC's standard answer to every question about him became a running gag in itself: "We never comment on speculation as to whom or what the Stig is."

The three men behind the suit

Perry McCarthy was the first Stig, wearing an all black suit from the show's relaunch on 20 October 2002. The mystery lasted barely three months. The Sunday Mirror named him on 12 January 2003, and McCarthy later confirmed it himself in his own book. The show wrote him out with a mock fatal stunt, and from 2 November 2003 the suit turned white for Ben Collins, a stunt and racing driver who held the role for seven years.

Collins kept the secret longer, but a planned memoir called The Man in the White Suit forced the issue. The BBC tried to block the book in court, and when a High Court ruling went against the broadcaster on 1 September 2010, Collins's identity became public within days. A new White Stig appeared on screen from 26 December 2010, and this one stayed hidden for fourteen years. Only in September 2024, at a private screening of The Grand Tour's final episode, did Clarkson himself tell the room that British GT champion Phil Keen had been the man in the suit all along.

Stigs in other countries

The character was never exported wholesale. When Top Gear Australia launched its own local edition, marketing called its driver the Stig's "Australian cousin", and by its second season the show made clear this was a separate character from the UK original, not the same person moved continents. Top Gear America built its own version too, an anonymous driver who ran the Power Laps on that show rather than borrowing footage of the British Stig. Each territory got its own masked mystery rather than one global Stig.

Why it still matters to fans

Part of the appeal is that the joke never really ends. Even after Keen's reveal, nobody outside the production ever learned which of the three drove which lap time on which car, since the show treated every lap as if it came from the same anonymous figure. That is the point of the character: not any one driver, but the idea that a number on a lap board means more when nobody knows who set it.

Sources

• The Stig, Wikipedia
• Jeremy Clarkson reveals the mystery identity of the final Stig, Carscoops
• Phil Keen, Wikipedia
• Top Gear Australia, Wikipedia
• Top Gear (American TV series), Wikipedia