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When Top Gear returned in 2002 with a new format it was quickly decided that what the programme needed was an in-house racing driver to take advantage of the show’s test track, which had been converted from an old airfield. Unfortunately, the producers immediately realised that there was one big problem with this: racing drivers are only good at driving and almost anything they say is going to be completely uninteresting, a condition that many experts refer to as “Mansell’s Syndrome”.

To get around this, Top Gear’s new expert driver would be unique. He would be less man, more machine; a shadowy figure in black who – crucially – would never, ever speak.

The plan worked brilliantly and the newly christened “Stig” – he was going to be called “The Gimp” but the BBC thought that was in bad taste – simply let his driving do the talking. Unfortunately, while speaking wasn’t his forte, it turned out that he wasn’t especially good at listening either and when it was suggested that it would be a bad idea to drive a knackered Jaguar XJS along the deck of an aircraft carrier and attempt to stop before the end, he paid no attention whatsoever and plunged into the sea, never to be seen again.

Top Gear presenters taking over the world

The presenters of the hit show Top gear aim for anarchy and global domination, writes Richard Fleury

Background

• If Jeremy Clarkson really was PM. . .

• Secrets of the Stig

• Fast but not so furious

• The cars are the stars - from Roller to Nissan GT-R

Background

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This occurred at the start of the third series and left Top Gear with the problem of how to replace him – a problem that was neatly solved mere days after the first Stig’s watery demise when a strange figure in white turned up at the test track and refused to leave.

He looked like a racing driver, he acted like a racing driver and, while he probably didn’t smell like a racing driver (unless, of course, all pro racers carry the weird stench of a photocopier -cartridge recycling facility), he seemed to tick all the important boxes. In fact, he turned out to be faster than the old Stig and even braver to boot.

This bravery has been one of brighter, whiter Mk 2 Stig’s biggest assets. When a Koenigsegg supercar spat him off the track at 120mph, he simply waited until the car had stopped spinning through a tyre wall, shrugged and strolled back to base to explain – via his customary medium of clicks, nods and smearing his own tears on a piece of black cardboard – that it needed more downforce at the back end.

When he was shipped to the Isle of Man to join Jeremy, Richard and James in testing some powerful coupés, he set blistering times on a closed road circuit even though it was so wet and windy that all the spectators almost drowned. Some commentators have suggested that this is because there is no such thing as rain on his home planet. All anyone can say for sure is that wherever this knight in white Nomex comes from, it’s a place that breeds creatures with testicles of pure titanium.

The Stig’s travels don’t extend simply to the Isle of Man either. When Top Gear decamped to Norway for a Winter Olympics special, the tame racing driver mysteriously arrived from nowhere and calmly jumped a skidoo off a ski jump before silently disappearing into the night.

And even when he can’t make it overseas – he certainly doesn’t have a passport and when he wants to get to another country, the best guess is that he swims there – he seems to have an army of relatives who have inherited his immense driving skill. Thus far Top Gear has encountered Stig’s African cousin in the heart of Bot-swana and his fat American cousin who appears to live in a trailer somewhere in the southern United States.

What we do know is that while he is able to grapple with even the most powerful car, he seems incapable of understanding how to use stairs. His ability to disappear for days on end is legendary yet if you want to keep him in one place you simply need to plonk him in front of a television and put on a rerun of ’Allo ’Allo.

Physiologically he seems to be a human, but on hot days it’s hard to ignore the hydraulic fluid that leaks from his knees. Otherwise, much about him is hard to pin down.

Without the Stig, Top Gear would be a barren place. His ability to wring the best from a car is without equal, although on the plus side the production team would probably be able to open a packet of Haribo without a man-ically grunting figure in white swooping in from nowhere to scoff the lot in one go.

He is without question the best driver on British television, nay the best driver in the entire world. And yet nobody truly knows who he is. Except perhaps Lewis Hamilton who, for some reason, is never around when the Stig enters the room.

Man of mystery

When Top Gear relaunched, the mysterious “tame racing driver” Stig Mk 1 was recruited by the programme to drive anything and everything, fast. Then came his challenge on the show’s biggest prop to date, the 20,000-ton HMS Invincible. Stig was charged with racing against a Harrier jump jet to 100mph over 200 metres in the Top Gear Jag. But he overshot his braking point and the navy divers never recovered his body . . .

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