Jeremy Clarkson stands on Diddly Squat Farm, sending three new blokes off into a job nobody thought could survive him. “Seriously, have fun with this,” he says. “I mean it, and good luck. And don’t f–k it up.”
They mostly didn’t.
All six episodes of season 1 of The Grand Tour’s new series are on Prime Video now, hosted by Thomas Holland, James Engelsman and Francis Bourgeois. It’s an ambitious attempt to prove the format can keep going without the lineup that built it, and perhaps against all odds, it works.
A handoff, not a hard reset
That Clarkson sketch is cute if slightly clunky, positioning him as something closer to a head of state than an elder peer. But it’s a smart springboard. The show may be restarting at “Season 1” as far as Prime Video is concerned, yet it isn’t pretending the previous 22 years didn’t happen.
Which makes this less a reboot than a relay. Somebody handed over the baton and the new lot just kept running.
Worth remembering how high the bar sits. At the peak of its power, The Grand Tour became Prime Video’s most-watched unscripted UK original series globally, and it’s been up on the hoist since September 2024, when Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May took their final bow in “One for the Road.”
Nobody cut the budget
The formula’s intact: bespoke themed segments plus long-form road trips, here across parts of the US, Malaysia and Angola. If money got tighter after the original trio left, you can’t see it on screen.
The vehicle footage is still sumptuously shot. Nobody’s skimping on expensive ideas either, whether that’s flinging an unwanted Tesla through the air with a giant airbag to destroy it, or staging a hypercar race involving three jets and a £2.1 million, 2,031 brake horsepower Hennessey Venom F5 Revolution Evolution.
The train guy is the best part
What pleases most is how fast the three of them click. Holland and Engelsman arrive from Throttle House, the well-established YouTube motoring channel, so their chemistry has had years of video content to develop. They’re comfortable in front of a camera talking about cars and, more usefully, comfortable disagreeing with each other. The unplanned exchanges land like credible banter between mates.
Bourgeois is the surprise. He’s the one member of the trio who doesn’t come from motoring journalism, and his inclusion was hard to figure out before his debut. I’ve never used TikTok, so his social media schtick is a blank to me, but his enthusiasm for the job is infectious and he seems extremely knowledgeable.
The show leans into his established social media fascination with trains. He knows cars too. He’s a truly interesting fellow who communicates with the quietly spoken authority of someone twice his age, then flips a switch and turns into a buzzing teenager behind the wheel. Highly watchable as both.
The restomod segment they should’ve pushed further
For a quick taste of his presenting style, go to the opening segment of Episode 4, where he and Holland pit two hideously expensive restomods against each other: a Totem GT Super reimagining the classic Alfa Romeo GTA, and the Prodrive P25, a half-a-million pound remake of the absolutely legendary Subaru Impreza 22B.
I’m an absolute sucker for ’90s rally cars, so I couldn’t help sharing Bourgeois’ deep admiration for the P25. It also arrived with one of the strongest needle drops in the show’s history. One of the best rock bangers of the ’90s to celebrate one of the baddest four-bangers ever unleashed on gravel? Yes, please.
They could’ve done more with it, honestly. Taking a recognizable classic and updating it with new, modern internals is precisely what this season is doing to itself. The script would’ve almost written itself.
What Top Gear kept getting wrong
Before the new series debuted, Holland admitted his first reaction to hearing The Grand Tour was being rebooted without Clarkson, Hammond or May: “Only a moron would take that job.”
Fair. The precedent is grim. After Clarkson was axed from the BBC’s Top Gear and Hammond, May and producer and co-creator Andy Wilman followed him out the door, the show spent years hunting for a replacement lineup. Eight different hosts from 2016 until it was put on ice in 2023. It became fascinated with sitcom stars, cricket players and F1 team founders, and it never rediscovered the proper formula.
It’s early days, but I think The Grand Tour has. And not just by cashing the cameos from Clarkson, Hammond and May for a quick, low-hanging line of credibility between the two versions.
It works because it understands the DNA of what I want out of this show: light but legitimate motoring journalism wrapped around an earnest depiction of genuine male camaraderie. That’s the recipe. Nobody reinvented it.
Six episodes in, I don’t know these blokes anywhere near as well as I know the on-screen personalities of Clarkson, Hammond and May. But I think I might like to.
