A Stig (but little excitement) in the tale

The Man in the White Suit: The Stig, Le Mans, Fast Lane and MeBy Ben Collins Harper Collins, €24

JUST IN case you didn't know, The Stig, Top Gear'stame racing driver, is a 35-year old man called Ben Collins. He has three children and lives in the West Country in England.

The Stig perhaps wasn’t intended to become as popular as he became as few could have predicted that a motoring show on a Sunday evening on BBC 2 would become one of the most watched television programmes in the world, with some 500 millions viewers worldwide per week.

After reading The Man in the White Suityou get the feeling that the producers of Top Gearwould have preferred the Stig to have been played by some sort of android, because the difficulty is that most racing driver's come with egos and anonymity doesn't really suit them.

This was perhaps less the case with Collins, who managed to stay hidden from public view for seven years while his character and the speculation about who played it escalated. But it got the better of him in the end and perhaps he has overestimated our interest in people who play faceless roles on television programmes.

The main problem with this book is that it's pretty dull. It starts off well, with the audition for the show, as Collins takes on the Top Geartest track and beats the original Stig's time on his first go. Then we learn about Collins' early life, the fact that he wanted to be a fighter pilot and that he was also a superb swimmer and that he spent time in America.

But from here it jumps all over the place, from chapters on his sometimes mediocre racing career to the time he spent as an SAS reservist. If you came to this book for some petrolheaded insight, this is all very tedious.

What is particularly absent is any real backroom details of the Top Gearshow and its hosts. There is little mention of what he thought of Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond – three stars that he is unlikely to be spending much time with from now on.

However, you do get the feeling that he held Hammond in the highest regard as there is a chapter dealing with the background of Hammond’s horror crash and this does give an interesting insight into events leading up to the crash.

Sadly the descriptions of driving some of the cars featured in the show get a little laborious. You start to hope that sitting alongside Collins as he thrashed various supercars around the Top Gearcircuit is infinitely more interesting than reading his descriptions of them.

You can understand why anyone playing a role like this would get fed up with it. Driving to and from work in a balaclava, lying to your friends and family and sitting in a windowless room until you were needed for shooting could get old pretty soon, but this is a small price to pay for what was most certainly a generous pay cheque and the ability to walk down the street without any fuss in real life.

Collins is likely to be pretty disappointed with life post-Stig. Perhaps he will get the racing career he feels he deserves or perhaps the media career he so obviously craves. Then there is always after-dinner speaking, which Stig Marque 1, Perry McCarthy, makes a career from now. It’s a simple change of circuit, where you move from teaching Tom Cruise to power drift one week to telling old yarns to photocopier salesmen from Barnsley the next.

Overall The Man in the White Suitfalls short of what it could have been. It isn't the insightful backstage pass to Top Gearthat we thought it might have been and all it really serves to do is probably kill off a character that children loved and we preferred to keep a mystery. And that is a shame.