Amid all the drama and unpredictability that’s surrounded Top Gear and The Grand Tour over the last decade or so, one question seems to have slipped through the cracks a little – who was the last person to wear the iconic white overalls of The Stig? Well, now that Top Gear looks to be over and Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May have called time on their tenure on The Grand Tour, Clarkson has revealed all.
Back when Top Gear was in its pomp, the identity of the show’s tame racing driver was a hot topic everywhere from schoolyards to offices to pubs (heck, we wouldn’t be surprised if it popped up in Parliament every now and then).
The original Stig – who wore black overalls rather than white – lasted for the first two seasons of the revived Top Gear in 2002 and 2003. He was portrayed by Perry McCarthy, who drove for the backmarker Andrea Moda F1 team in 1992, and also had five cracks at Le Mans, DNFing every time. He was ditched from the show when he revealed his identity in 2003.
The second Stig, you’ll no doubt be aware, was racing driver Ben Collins. After he attempted to publish an autobiography in 2010, he too was dropped amid a high-profile legal wrangle with the BBC.
Following that, Collins was replaced with a second white-suited Stig, who lasted right up until the end of the Top Gear TV show in 2022. Speculation about his identity hasn’t been quite as rife, but the question was nevertheless posed to Jeremy Clarkson during a Q&A and screening party of The Grand Tour: One For The Road at his Oxfordshire pub.
Phil Keen; third from right
Clarkson confirmed that since 2010, the man beneath the white overalls has been Phil Keen, a now-40-year-old racing driver from Berkshire, England. After a brief stint in open wheelers early in his career, Keen has spent 20 years in GT racing. Currently, he drives a Mercedes-AMG GT3 in the British GT Championship, and a Ferrari 296 GT3 in the European Le Mans Series.
In 2015, he actually worked alongside second Stig Ben Collins on his TV show, Stunt Driver, and as The Stig, the 19 fastest power lap times around the Top Gear Test Track were all set by him.
Phil Keen’s Lamborghini Huracan in the 2016 Blancpain Endurance Series
While Top Gear as a TV show probably isn’t coming back, The Stig still holds marketing sway, and still occasionally pops up in the brand’s digital output. Whether that same allure will be there now we know his identity remains to be seen.
