The Skoda That Made the Stig Jump ; He Beat the Bbc When They Tried to Gag Him. So Who Better Than Ex Stig Ben Collins to Make a Ruthless Choice Between Six Executive Saloons (and Test Their Sporty Features to the Full)?

Summary

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On a quiet Home Counties road in January, a 35-year-old father of three is driving a Skoda between leafy verges. It's an everyday scene. A bend approaches. The car hardly slows, carrying a racing line through the curve and immediately accelerating up a short hill, gathering so much speed that at the crest it takes off , all four wheels leaving the ground before slamming back down, taking another tight corner with a squeal of tyres and disappearing in a cloud of dust.

This is no ordinary driver on no ordinary road (this is Millbrook, a private test track in Bedfordshire). But it is an ordinary car - and parked nearby are a Mercedes, a BMW, a Ford, a Vauxhall and a Jaguar, all waiting to be given the same treatment. You wouldn't look twice at them if you were here, and that's the point. Decades of consumerism and technological progress mean that even across a range of Pounds 22,000-Pounds 47,000, cars aimed at the successful middle class are remarkably similar in terms of safety, comfort and improved efficiency. It takes particular skills to tease out the fine pros and cons, and Live has enlisted a man who's more than qualified to probe the very modern line between comfort and performance.

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The Skoda That Made the Stig Jump ; He Beat the Bbc When They Tried to Gag Him. So Who Better Than Ex Stig Ben Collins to Make a Ruthless Choice Between Six Executive Saloons (and Test Their Sporty Features to the Full)?

Some say he spent the past eight years in a white suit and helmet. All we know is, he's no longer called The Stig...

Here is an interesting fact: type the words 'who is' into Google, and the software's auto-complete function will attempt to finish your question for you. Try it now. The first response is, 'Who is The Stig?' This has been the top 'who is' search for much of the past decade. The phrase generates links to more than 200,000 web pages, including lengthy investigations by several respected newspapers. You'd be forgiven for thinking that the man in white's identity was a matter of national importance.

To the BBC, it was. In August of last year the Corporation spent Pounds 76,000 of licence fee-payers' money on an injunction barring 35-year-old racing driver and stuntman Ben Collins from publishing his autobiography The Man In The White Suit, in which he reveals he was The Stig from 2003 to 2010. Collins won the case in the H...

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