🇬🇧 Ben Collins

Ben Collins is a semi-professional racing driver with a Racer Rating of 4,398, placing him at the professional level; he competes in fields where semi-professionals and full-time paid drivers regularly race one another. His formal FIA categorisation is Silver, a professional-level sportscar and endurance grading that denotes drivers who are typically young or early-career, as distinct from the full-professional Gold and Platinum grades. Collins raced across four decades from 1997 to 2023, though his competitive record spans only ten starts across four separate series, leaving limited statistical evidence of his standing among peers.[1]

His racing activity was sparse and discontinuous. Six drives in Formula 3 Macau between 1997 and 2000 yielded no finishes in the points; he returned to single-seaters only once more, competing in three World Endurance Championship rounds in 2014 without points, where he finished 25th overall and raced against established professionals including Mark Webber, a one-time champion, and Soheil Ayari, a full-professional sportscar driver. Against these rivals Collins was outpaced consistently. His single start in the British GT Championship came in 2023. Across all races, his average finish was eighth; however, this reflects only classified finishes and masks large gaps between Collins and the field. When racing against established professionals and full-time sportscar drivers, Ayari, Webber, Monteiro and Baumgartner, Collins finished behind them in the substantial majority of encounters. On the isolated occasions when he beat stronger drivers such as Zsolt Baumgartner and Patrick Friesacher, these were single results rather than patterns of competitive superiority.[2]

Collins is now retired from racing. His career in competition was secondary to his public profile as The Stig, the famous television presenter of Top Gear, a role that dominated his working life from 2003 to 2010. Recent activity suggests he remains involved in motorsport through television and media appearances rather than active racing.