EXCLUSIVE Q&A
TV’s Stig speaks to MN about his motor racing career
Bizarrely, Ben Collins is now best known for a television role where he can’t talk or be identified. But his job as Top Gear’s resident tame racing driver brought him to the front pages of the national newspapers.
Had life taken a slightly different turn earlier on in his career, he could well have been writing the headlines on the sports pages instead.
He showed a lot of promise in his formative years racing in the
UK, progressing through Formula Vauxhall Junior, Formula Vauxhall and then on to British Formula 3.
As is the case with so many young drivers, the finance wasn’t there to complete his journey.
Instead, he turned his hand to the small screen while trying to maintain his racing programmes. He raced at Le Mans four times and even had a chance to tackle three rounds of the Australian Supercar series including sharing a Holden at Bathurst in 2009.
Collins has worked on a number of films doing the driving work, including being a stunt double for Daniel Craig in the Quantum of Solace James Bond movie and in the Ford v Ferrari epic that was released in 2019.
Last week, he found time to tackle the Motorsport News readers’ questions.
Question: Was it always your dream to be a grand prix driver? Was the interest sparked by your father Bill?
John Charles
Via email
Ben Collins: “We had a model of a
JPS black Lotus Formula 1 car on the mantlepiece for years and I used to gaze at it. It was a beautiful thing, there was something about the fat slick tyres, and the wings and that evocative livery. I was mesmerised. But, actually, racing was pretty remote. I wasn’t one of those people who would really watch grand prix racing. Dad did but even he would fall asleep: I would watch maybe a lap or something.
“The real thrill for me was being a passenger on any trip that involved dad behind the wheel. There was always space for an overtaking move. Some of his more manic moves came when he had a Rover SD1. They were eye-openers! I thought it was great fun, and I used to pull the handbrake coming out of the drive and we would go for it.
I had a little pedal kart as a kid which was a scaled-down version of the Formula 1 car with all the wings on it and stuff, and I would skid that around on the patio. I remember doing a figure of eight with the dog chasing me.
“Motorsport wasn’t really in my thoughts and then I moved to America when I was very small. Sure, F1 is global now, but it was very European-focused back then so it wasn’t really on the radar.
“I got into competition in a big way when I was in the USA. I was swimming a lot – training twice a day – and I was competing at the weekends and there is a bug that gets you when you compete. That started there.
“The racing thing didn’t really kick in until I was 18. I was back in the UK and my dad bought me a racing school day at Silverstone. That was when the light switch went on for me. I still hadn’t even been to a grand prix at that age. Dad had also started doing a bit of racing by then. He had worked hard all his life. He was very athletic as a younger guy but like a lot of businessmen, that got lost! Inside the body of this 16-stone man was the mind of an athlete still. He had earned his money, worked hard all his life and decided he wanted to go racing, so he was into it. My mum bought him his first trackday, which is something
I am sure she regrets…
“Dad did a couple of races in Formula First for SpeedSport and then the guys said to him that he should do Formula Vauxhall Lotus. So there was this late 40s businessman stepping up to slicks
and wings with all the kids. Fortunately, with his experience of driving fast road cars, he didn’t kill himself straight away! He was on the grid with the likes of Dario Franchitti and Kevin McGarrity. I went to watch him a few times – if anything just to validate the stories of derring-do that he would come back with – and I really enjoyed being in the paddock and being part of the scene. There was a different language, there was the hustle and bustle. But it still felt a million miles away from me doing doughnuts on a quadbike in a field outside our home.” MN: So if being a racing driver wasn’t your plan, what was it?
BC: “I had always wanted to be a fighter pilot, that was the dream, but that turned to dust because they had very stringent and particular requirements with the eyesight. Although I have got perfect eyesight, they didn’t like the conditions in one of my eyes, so that was parked. Not long after that came the chance to get in a singleseater at Silverstone – it was one of the school’s own Formula Ford 1600 chassis.
According to them – and I don’t know whether to believe these things or not – I was under their school lap record in the first session, but then the engine blew up through no fault of my own. Steve Deeks was my instructor, and he said to my dad that maybe we should give it a shot. Sitting in a single-seater with your arse on the floor and looking at all the gauges, those first laps, it really cemented everything for me. The car was so ultra-responsive: it was like putting your hand into a glove. There was such an incredible bond with those cars. It was an immediate addiction and it was all I could talk about from there on in.”
Question: Was it just grand prix racing or nothing for you when you first realised you wanted to race?
Emma Facey
Via email
BC: “I very much drunk my own KoolAid [an American expression for those who dream big despite the high risks]. I read two books, and they were the only things I had in my armoury. One was the Gilles Villeneuve book by Gerald Donaldson and the other was about Ayrton Senna. The Senna model seemed to be fairly clear, which was that you won all the races. That was the goal, but it wasn’t a practical aim in your first season, hence I had so many crashes to begin with because I was very uncompromising. It took a while to sink in that you can’t win all of them. It was some time before I realised that you had to gauge risk, rather than be bull-headed. It took three large crashes for that to sink in, and it was only when someone said ‘if you do that again, you won’t be racing anymore’ for it to finally register. It was the team manager, he said there was nothing left to crash. I was on my last chassis. That actually gave me a useful sense of fear. I was enjoying myself, not thinking about the risks or the damage, and it was only the threat of not racing that really spoke to me and it was very powerful.”
MN: By the time you got to Formula 3, you seemed to be more of a classical driver, a smoother driver? Is that true? BC: “I had definitely learned the right way to drive by that point, that was embedded. To become complete, I still had lots to learn and I was still making some silly mistakes even into the F3 years, but a lot of that came from frustration because I was desperate and hell-bent to get to Formula 1 and nothing else really was in my consciousness. We knew we had been handicapped in F3 and we had an engine that was down-on-power, which I know is the perennial whinge. I would love to have done more in F3 and won more. It was the ultimate proving ground, it was so close and there were so many good drivers there.”
Question: You drove for Jackie Stewart’s Paul Stewart Racing team in Formula Vauxhall in the Winter Series in 1995. How much advice did he give you?
Russell Scobbie
Via email
BC: “He is an incredible man and at that point in my career, I was totally in awe of him. He is such a professional, and I guess it was like holding up a mirror to myself. He would come to the races immaculately dressed, prepared, he had a schedule. His influence was everywhere you looked in the team. It was just perfectly presented, and so driving for PSR gave you this incredible confidence. You could eat your breakfast off the floor of the awning. The car was so well prepared and they had thought of everything. Graham Taylor was the team manager and he was very astute, even to the smallest of things.
Even down to things like them using different brake pads in qualifying than in the race. It would be more aggressive and the tyres could handle it in qualifying when they were brand new, but might have been prone to locking when the rubber was used. They taught you the package as a driver too. They were strict, but they taught you how to get the most from yourself as a racer.”
Question: Who was the best of the crop you raced against in your early single
seater days? There was some real up-and-coming talent back then…
Jon Wood
Via email
BC: “People like Marc Hynes and Justin Wilson were very fair and you knew you were in for a good race with them. But in those early days, when I was in Formula Vauxhall Junior, the one you didn’t really want to be racing wheel-to-wheel with was Darren Malkin. He was very fast, but he always seemed to be very angry.
“When we were together on track, it was a nightmare because you had two angry young men going side-by-side… you knew there would be no quarter with him, he would be tapping you all the time and the Vauxhall Junior cars were quite sensitive and other drivers could easily mess up the toe-links on the rear with a knock in the right place. Darren would be after those and doing all kinds of bad stuff.
“When you go up a level and you get into slicks-and-wings, some things change. Justin Wilson was very very talented and very ballsy and took to the downforce cars really well. But then look what Marc Hynes did by winning the British F3 title. I think Marc just took a bit more time to adapt to stuff ”
Question: At what point in your career did you realise that the Formula 1 dream was not going to happen?
Barry May
Via email
BC: “Well, in my first year of Formula 3 [in 1996], I got as close to F1 as I was ever going to get – without realising it at the time. I had a meeting with Arrows. This was a very sobering meeting. There was an opportunity to become their test driver, and this opportunity came with a £1 million price tag – but even by modern standards, that was quite cheap.
“We had the talks, but I remember being quite surprised, because I thought you got paid to do that job as opposed to handing over the cash. But when you unpick a lot of these stories, that is the way it works. I think Niki Lauda paid to get into Formula 1 when he started out – even Ayrton Senna brought some funding too.
“I know there are some drivers who are plucked from the lower categories and put straight into grand prix racing, but that came as quite a shock to me. It was not what I expected, and I suppose at that point, the reality began to kick in that this was a financial exercise as much as it was about your skill. It was about who you know and who knows you. That put quite a dent in my rationale about what were my chances of pulling it off.
“It was then that I began to broaden my thinking and start looking at America and other places with opportunities where you could race at the weekend and actually win prize money, and that prize money could pay the rent and potentially you could get picked up by a sponsored team.”
Question: ASCAR: how difficult were they to adapt to? They must have been so alien for any driver from Britain to get the hang of?
Neil Fletcher
Via email
BC: “I got in with then surprisingly easily. The bug adaption for me had been when I was doing Indy Lights in the USA. I was teamed with Scott Dixon in 1999. It’s funny you ask about the emerging talent in the UK in my early days, but I think Scott was the best all-rounder I had driven alongside. I adapted to oval racing there, but it was in a single-seater and it was very fast. When I saw the ASCAR in the UK, I wasn’t sure if I would be able to adapt to it because they looked like trucks.
You sat inside it and it was so industrial, with a massive gearstick and these huge proportions. But as soon as you got going, all sense of the scale of the car disappeared and you went back to just doing what you do as a racing driver.
“All the sensations of the oval, I found, clicked into place and I felt completely at home. In a single-seater, when you lose grip on the oval it happens very quickly and so you have to creep up on the limit. There is a bit more leniency with the stock cars: not that much more, but a bit.
“In an ASCAR, running on your own on the track, I loved it. I loved the fast corners so that came together intuitively. You have got the wall there, but if you’ve raced around Macau, then that isn’t a problem… The big difference is racing in a pack of cars. That draft changes the way things work and you can’t see but you get weird telltale signs in your eardrums that the air pressure around you is changing.
It is all very unusual and the car goes light. You realise that it is all about the holes in the air. It is strange, and there is a real dark art to this.
“I did two years of ASCAR, which is ASA level in the States, and then I did an ASA race in America too. And I also got a test in a NASCAR later on in my career for a magazine, and I did good enough times that I nearly got picked up: there were discussions. I was blown away by that.”
Question: Did being the Stig make it harder to get race deals? Even with the anonymity?
Anthony Wilson
Via email
BC: “Initially it made no difference because nobody knew that I was doing it. It didn’t help, but it didn’t really hinder me either. But then bizarrely, afterwards, I am not sure how motorsport people size you up. My gut feeling is that once you have crossed into television land, you are taken a little bit less seriously as a racing driver.”
MN: When you signed up to do the Stig, was that a conscious career choice or was it just another job to pay the bills?
BC: “It was a career choice. I had come to realise that motorsport revolved around money, and nobody gives two hoots about a bloke ringing from their flat trying to get backing but they’ve never heard of you, etc. That was quite a familiar situation for me. I had seen some of the drivers like Darren Manning and Jason Plato cleverly getting themselves on TV, getting a bit of self-promotion going and I thought that was actually quite smart.” MN: But you were going to be anonymous as the Stig?
BC: “Yes but who knows where it was going to go? My gut feeling was that even that role was I would be a racing driver on TV, and I might have been able to get the cameras to go to the races and we could have taken this character into motorsport. That would have been the dream ticket, and towards the latter part of my time there that very nearly happened. We were on the verge of going to Le Mans with the LMP1 Aston Martin and do something serious.
“It never stopped me getting any motorsport deals, it just ran alongside what I was doing on track anyway.
It was 2002-ish until 2010: I suppose very occasionally there would be a little bit of a conflict with diaries, but that didn’t happen often.”
If you were paid to drive fast in a blockbuster film, which film and which car would you choose from any era, past and present?
Mike Stokoe
Via Twitter
MN: Bullitt, surely?
BC: “I tell you why I’d say no to Bullitt,
and that is because Steve McQueen did all of his own driving stunts in that one – you’d spend most of your time sat on the sidelines watching him do all the work!”
MN: Le Mans?
BC: “I did that, I did the driving in Ford vs Ferrari! Le Mans would have been cool, but maybe John Frankenheimer’s Ronin
[which features a six-minute car chase].
“Going on TV was a career choice for me” Ben Collins
That was the picture that got me into movies, really.”
Question: Who do you think was the best star you had in a reasonably priced car on Top Gear? Anyone who could have made it as a professional?
AutoTradition
Via Twitter
BC: “Jennifer Saunders was really good. There were lots of good talents on there. To be fair, if you were going to ask me who would make it as a professional racing driver, then I would have to say Tom Cruise because he could turn his mind to whatever he wanted to do. He wrung the neck of the car and he is fantastic: he is super physical and he does his own stunts, etc. But Jennifer Saunders was probably the most natural of all the stars I sat with and she was extremely fast. I don’t know where it came from but I have heard subsequently that she is into her driving. She was really funny and just very laid back.”
Question: Which celebrity driver scared you the most on the Top Gear test track?
Jack Crowther
Via email
BC: “Jimmy Carr and Chris Evans. I said to Chris ‘you have absolutely no sense of self-preservation, do you?’He said ‘a lot of people tell me that!’When you are going backwards across the grass at 80mph, it just didn’t seem to be important to him to press the brake pedal. And Jimmy Carr, equally, had no sense whatsoever that he was in a vehicle. He seems quite imaginative when you see him perform, but there was no imagination behind the wheel! Perhaps he has never had a car crash before…”
Question: What is the best track you’ve raced at?
Malcom Munt
Via email
BC: “That has to be Macau. It is the ultimate challenge as a driver. You have got the long straight where it is all about the drag racing in the draft. It is game on and it makes it into an engineering dilemma in terms of the car’s set-up. You want to be fast over the twisty hill, which is just mind-bogglingly insane to navigate, and you also want to be slippery down the straights. There is a tactical element to it, there is a proper racing element to it. Everything there is so touch and go, you have to be all-in in terms of commitment when you race around there to make a decent lap time and it is just quite a surreal experience to be driving in those type of streets. You have got everything from first- and second-gear corners where you are rubbing walls to being utterly flat-out. It is a great place.”
Question: Why do European drivers struggle with Aussie V8s?
Damien Doherty
Via email
MN: Doing three races in 2009 with
Kelly Racing must have been a real culture shock...
BC: “Everybody struggles with Aussie V8s – except the people who are in it regularly! I, like everybody else, looked at those cars and though ‘great: these are big muscle cars’. I thought it would be right up my alley. But the tyres are half the width of a British GT car. So they look like GTs, but they are not. Not only are they narrower, they have bugger all grip. They are really under-tyred and then secondly you have the spool differential. You might think ‘so what?’– it is just a different type of diff. But what surprised me was that you have this big brute car with an awesome V8, but it is dancing around in ballet shoes.
“There is no feedback from the tyres. There is so little feeling from the tyres that the drivers all wear these little buzzers that tell them when they have locked up. I have never experienced something like that before. That is for all the top guys, even drivers like Jamie Whincup. They have to, because you just can’t tell. You press the brake and there is no rumble, no sense of broken traction, nothing, and then you realise that you’ve got a puncture because you have gone through the tyre.
“The whole thing is not what it looks like. It looks like you are arm wrestling a tiger, whereas you are actually dancing around on tip-toes.”
MN: Did you enjoy it then?
BC: “I did enjoy it, yes, but it was not the balls-out racing that I thought it was. The racing is flat out, but the driving is very complicated. The only time it felt remotely natural was when the tyres were brand new. Then you could carry some speed into corners and start driving it the way you wanted to. Beyond that, nothing else resembles any other racing car I had been into. The guys who do it are very good, and guys who come into it are quite shocked with the driving style involved.”
Question: Why was your appearance in British Touring Car Championship for Motorbase Performance only a one off? Do you want to do more?
Alison Ainsley
Via email
BC: “It was quite a fun weekend, that one. We had some gearbox trouble so I had hardly any running before the event and my first proper lap was the first lap of the first race at Brands Hatch. I started at the back with a new car that hadn’t been fully set-up. I loved that weekend though but ultimately it all comes down to budget. Raising that kind of budget has become elusive but I would desperately love to go back into touring cars.”
Question: Is there a race which you have yet to do that you would love to?
Dennis Burgess
Via email
BC: “I would still love to win Le Mans. That would be a dream and we came very close to winning the class in 2011. The
Bathurst 12 Hours, that is another one. I went to do it in a Maranello Ferrari that I was sharing with Mika Salo and Tony D’Alberto. Mika went out in practice and was second quickest on hard tyres, so we knew we had a winning car. Then Tony went out and got it wrong in traffic and wrote the car off. I went back to Sydney with Mika and we went to the bar…”
Question: Who was your most talented team-mate you’ve ever had?
Ed Sleigh
Via email
BC: “I will go back to Scott Dixon as the best from my time in Indy Lights. He was not only fast in all respects but he had a very mature approach from a young age, which was a bit annoying for me! He had that other thing that you need to have as a racing driver, and that was that he was lucky. You’d see his car get hit or something, and you would be thinking to yourself ‘how did that not rip a wheel off?’ He is a great guy.”
Question: Are you still a racing driver first and foremost? Or a stunt driver? Or a presenter?
Darren Matthews
Via email
BC: “All my skills developed from being a racing driver and that will never go away. It has set me up for the other work. I have loved the movies and stunt work, that has been fantastic. But it is the racing that underpins my make up. I am no longer a racer now because I don’t have a drive but I haven’t stopped. I am a racing driver at heart. I love the other things, but that racing driver DNA is not going anywhere.” •