If you watch the BBC’s flagship car/motoring show, Top Gear, you’re probably familiar with the character of The Stig. He’s the tame racing driver who does the high speed test laps of cars featured on Top Gear, as Clarkson, the Hamster and Captain Slow can’t get around the track consistently. The Stig also trains the celebrity guests, who drive a hot lap in the Star in a Reasonably Priced Car segment.
(If you’ve never seen Top Gear, here’s a link to their website. Search for an episode and come back: We’ll wait for you.)
The running gag with the character of The Stig since 2003 has been his anonymity, in which, the British media, the BBC, the production company and the show itself have been willing co-conspirators. It adds to the slightly silly and iconoclastic bent of Top Gear.
Now, Ben Collins, in a roundabout way, has come out as the White Stig. The BBC tried to get an injunction stopping Collins’ autobiography from associating Ben Collins with the character of The Stig and the BBC got shut down.
The unfortunate part is that now a lot of non-gearhead/petrolheads know about Top Gear and The Stig. It used to be our little secret: A private handshake between the lads.
If you could appreciate a piano being dropped on a Morris Marina out of a clear blue sky, or caravans being used as conkers, hung from construction cranes, then you were part of the club. Oh and the news and reviews of the cars of course, then you understood the essential nature of Top Gear.
It really isn’t about the cars, more to the point, Top Gear is about enjoying automobiles, aside from their essential nature as transportation, but as their cultural identifiers, shorthand, or captions to a group of people.
For instance: A BMW M5 with rubber-band 30 series tires and $10,000 worth of rims tells me you are a complete idiot who most likely does not have even the basic motor functions of a brain stem. But you have a lot of money.
If your ride is a 1985 two-door Ford Tempo GL with running boards, neons and gradient tint rolling on 18 inch spinners, then you should be sterilized for the Good of Society and permanently banned from the Accessory aisles of Canadian Tire.
However, if the same car has been restored to original glory, complete with the dog-vomit coloured upholstery, then you understand the essential irony of the car. You actually have a mind: A sick one, but one worthy of consideration.
At the same time, if you can react fondly to the Fiat 850 hatchback, or the 1972 TR6, without the kneecaps on the bumpers that ruined the 1974, then you grew up across the street.
Incidentally, if you own an SUV and live in an apartment or high rise condo, without a rural address at the end of a logging road, you are unworthy. Especially if your SUV is either a Land Rover or a Cadillac. Please proceed to the fitting department for your personalized asshat.
That’s the thing with cars. They touch weird nerves in unusual ways at deep, elemental levels that are hard to define, impossible to communicate and confusing to write about if you don’t have the peculiar genetic makeup that tags you as a gear head.
That’s also what appeals to us about Top Gear. It’s OK to be a petrolhead and why, at the end of the day, it’s sad that The Stig has been unmasked.
Some say that his left nipple is shaped like the outline of the Nurburgring and that he suffers from Mansell’s Syndrome. All we know is we call him The Stig.
RoadDave 