On Diddly Squat Farm, Jeremy Clarkson dispatches three newcomers into a gig most people assumed had died with him. “Seriously, have fun with this,” he tells them. “I mean it, and good luck. And don’t f–k it up.”
By and large, they haven’t.
Season 1 of the new-look Grand Tour has landed on Prime Video in full — all six episodes — with Thomas Holland, James Engelsman and Francis Bourgeois in the driving seats. The gamble is a big one: can the format survive without the trio that made it? Improbably, the answer seems to be yes.
A handoff, not a hard reset
The Clarkson cameo is charming even if the staging creaks a bit, casting him as a retiring monarch rather than a former colleague. Still, it’s a clever way in. Prime Video may have reset the counter to “Season 1,” but the show makes no attempt to wish away the preceding 22 years.
Call it a relay rather than a reboot. The baton changed hands, and the new runners simply carried on.
It’s worth keeping the bar in mind. In its prime, The Grand Tour was Prime Video’s most-watched unscripted UK original series globally — and it has sat idle since September 2024, when Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May signed off in “One for the Road.”
Nobody cut the budget
The recipe hasn’t changed: purpose-built themed set pieces alongside sprawling road trips, this time taking in stretches of the US, Malaysia and Angola. Whatever happened to the finances once the original three departed, none of it shows up on screen.
Cars are still filmed with the same lavish eye, and the expensive ideas keep coming — launching an unloved Tesla skyward on an enormous airbag to obliterate it, or lining up a hypercar showdown featuring three jets and a £2.1 million, 2,031 brake horsepower Hennessey Venom F5 Revolution Evolution.
The train guy is the best part
The biggest relief is how quickly the three of them gel. Holland and Engelsman come over from Throttle House, the long-running YouTube motoring channel, which means their rapport has had years of footage to bed in. They talk about cars easily on camera and — more importantly — they’re happy to argue with one another. The off-script moments play like genuine mates winding each other up.
Bourgeois is the wildcard. He’s the only one of the three without a motoring journalism background, and before he appeared it was difficult to see what he’d bring. TikTok has never been part of my life, so his social media persona meant nothing to me going in, but his eagerness is contagious and his knowledge runs deep.
The programme happily plays up the train obsession he built his online following on. Cars are clearly in his wheelhouse as well. He’s a genuinely fascinating character, delivering things in the soft-spoken manner of someone decades older before switching gears and becoming a wired teenager the moment he’s behind the wheel. Both versions are a joy to watch.
The restomod segment they should’ve pushed further
If you want a sample of how he presents, the opening stretch of Episode 4 is the place to go: he and Holland set two eye-wateringly pricey restomods against each other — the Totem GT Super, a reinterpretation of the classic Alfa Romeo GTA, and the Prodrive P25, a half-a-million pound reworking of the utterly legendary Subaru Impreza 22B.
Nineties rally machinery is a weakness of mine, so Bourgeois’ reverence for the P25 was impossible not to share. It also came paired with one of the finest needle drops the show has ever managed. A great ’90s rock anthem soundtracking one of the meanest four-cylinder engines ever let loose on gravel? Go on, then.
If anything, the segment was under-exploited. Take something beloved and familiar, rebuild it with contemporary hardware underneath — that’s exactly the trick this season is pulling on itself. The joke was sitting right there.
What Top Gear kept getting wrong
Ahead of the launch, Holland copped to his initial reaction on hearing The Grand Tour would return without Clarkson, Hammond or May: “Only a moron would take that job.”
Understandable, given the history. Once Clarkson was dropped by the BBC’s Top Gear — with Hammond, May and producer and co-creator Andy Wilman walking out after him — that show spent years searching for a lineup that stuck. Eight presenters passed through between 2016 and its shelving in 2023. It kept reaching for sitcom stars, cricket players and F1 team founders, and never landed on the right mix again.
It’s too soon to be certain, but The Grand Tour looks to have found it. And not simply by trading on cameos from Clarkson, Hammond and May as a cheap bridge between eras.
It lands because it grasps what the show is actually made of: motoring journalism that’s breezy but real, built around an honest portrayal of blokes genuinely enjoying each other’s company. That’s the formula, and nobody has tried to rewrite it.
After six episodes, these three are nowhere near as familiar to me as the on-screen versions of Clarkson, Hammond and May. But I suspect I’d like them to be.