Not so fast: parking ticket for Collins
Ex ‘Stig’ Ben Collins joined host Christian O’Connell on Absolute Radio’s Breakfast show this morning.
Arriving in a purple dodgem, the racing driver returned to his quirky car halfway through the show to find he had been issued a ticket by the City of Westminster for parking on double yellow lines. It seems that years as British motoring’s most mysterious figure still doesn’t arm you against London’s traffic wardens.
One of the most talked about figures of 2010, Ben Collins sparked a media frenzy when he was revealed as The Stig. He continued to make headlines when he released the book ‘The Man in the White Suit’ about his life as The Stig and as a stunt double for Daniel Craig’s Bond. When the BBC pursued Collins legally and tried to prevent the publication of his autobiography, they merely added fuel to the fire, losing the subsequent court case and promoting the revelation.
Despite receiving a tough time from Clarkson and co since he left the show, Collins still wishes Top Gear every success. He said: “Fans of the show continue to be fans of the show, I don’t think it’s changed its popularity at all, I certainly didn’t intend it any harm and I enjoy watching it still.
“So I think the mystery continues, there’s a new Stig, good luck to him or her and give them the best of luck, I think its good that there’s someone new, it could have been more fun if they’d changed the colour a bit.”
When show host Christian O’Connell pressed him about his relationship with the show’s presenters, Collins revealed: “I did my best with all of them I suppose, and I spoke to James May shortly afterwards, because he’d written this about nailing my head to the table and all this kind of stuff, and he said it was all in good jest.”
The former Stig revealed that although the job was fun, particularly when training stars such as Tom Cruise to complete a racing lap, the secrecy that surrounded the role continued to grow with the show’s popularity
Speaking on the speculation he faced everyday in his role as The Stig, Collins said: “I managed to survive it really until 2008. The Radio Times published their version, and I think when the media saw that the BBC’s publication thought it was fair game to name Ben Collins as The Stig, they all ran their stories three months later, so it became known.
Ex-Stig Ben Collins in his new KETTLE Ridge Dodgem...
“Schumacher, the seven time world champion, came down and messed around at this windswept airfield in Guildford and tried to put people off the scent, but in the end, if you put ‘The Stig’ into Google it just said Ben Collins, and it was pretty obvious that the game was up in terms of the mystery, and people at the BBC were saying ‘We’re going to move you on’, and I didn’t want to wait to be pushed out of the door. I decided it was time to leave, so I put my notice in and wrote the book and left.”
During the interview Collins revealed that today’s car, freshly adorned with a parking fine, is part of the Kettle Ridge Dodgem Derby. He said: “I’m hoping that I’ll be able to keep this Kettle Dodgem, which is my sort of ride. It would be an ideal set of wheels.”
His next car will be a little bit faster though – Ben is set to race in the Le Mans 24 Hour series later this year. Collins may no longer be the Stig, but he hasn’t slowed down…
