I’ve blogged before mentioning the fact that I’m a car nut.  Nothing to brag about, but it’s a fact same as the sky is blue.  Except if you live in New England like me. Where the sky hasn’t been blue until this morning for about 2 weeks.

One of my favorite things from the world of car culture is BBC’s hit show TopGear.  With a following estimated around 250 million viewers strong worldwide, it is in fact the most-watched television show on the planet.

But this week, they saw an enormous ratings spike after the first episode of the newest season debuted on Sunday June 21st.  According to UK broadband traffic analyst PlusNet, the latest show generated an all-time record volume of bandwidth usage for BBC’s iPlayer on-demand video application.  At its peak, traffic hit 1.3 GB (GB!) p/s  (per second!) from viewers watching the show.  To put that in perspective, your home broadband internet connection offers you about half-of-one-percent of that kind of bandwidth. Per second.

The numbers are fun to think about, but more fun to think about is why so many people showed up.  And it boils down to perhaps one of the best PR stunts in recent memory: The Stig.

See, TopGear is now in its 13th season.  And while it has a big following, any show of that age is in danger of becoming old-hat pretty fast.  So every new season, the team has to come up fresh ideas to keep people intrigued:

TopGear tests lots of cars every week that Michael Schumacher (more on him in a minute) would be proud to own. And to put them all on a level plane, the Stig drives a hot lap around the same test track for every single one.  Suffice it to say, the Stig is an amazing driver – even current Formula 1 racing stars have been beaten around the track by him.

But the Stig always (always!, no really…) wears a helmet.  No one knows who he is.  Even the TopGear hosts can only introduce him by way of clever-yet-ludicrous suppositions (seriously, these are hilarious) about his personality every week: “Some say he only knows two facts about ducks, and that both of them are wrong.”

So basically, everyone in the world wants to know who it is. It has been one of the best kept secrets in all of TV.

Until last weekend.

With the promise that the Stig’s identity would finally be revealed on the new season’s first episode after years of rumors as to who it really was, it’s no wonder so many poeple jammed the information superhighway to get a look-see.

And what they saw was Michael Schumacher’s face emerge from under the Stig’s helmet (told you we’d be back on him).

But with the identity of the masked racer revealed, will TopGear fans start to pay less attention?  Probably not, especially after the show played a tape of Schumacher ‘getting lost’ on the same track that the Stig drives around every week. And the fact that the show ended with the hosts saying “I don’t think Michael Schumacher is the Stig after all.”

In fact, I suspect TopGear has even more viewers than ever now.