4 September 2026

The Grand Tour is spinning its wheels

The new hosts come across as three guys whose girlfriends happen to be friends

Rather like Arthur and his knights visiting Merlin in his cave, at the beginning of the relaunched The Grand Tour with Amazon Prime, the new trio of presenters – Francis Bourgeois, James Engelsman and Thomas Holland – visit former presenter Jeremy Clarkson on his farm, seeking his advice and blessing. They’re also seeking the return of the show’s studio tent, now repurposed as Clarkson’s farm restaurant. He refuses the tent, but supplies the advice, pulling one of those jowly, mouth-agape Clarkson faces: “Don’t fuck it up.” And they take it. They haven’t exactly fucked this up, but they haven’t done a hell of a lot else with it either.

No one cared about the cars. Of this, I am ever more sure. No one watched Top Gear, or indeed The Grand Tour, for the Cadillacs, crankshafts or carburettors. It was all about Clarkson, and, to a lesser extent, Richard Hammond and James May. Their final episode of The Grand Tour, in 2024, brought a 22-year-long collaboration to end.

The show’s new incarnation, following a two-year hiatus, can do the desert drives and abandoned airfields, the mild lewdness and watershed innuendo, the same techno-masturbatory cinematic style, filmed by directors reared purely on Michael Bay and the scores of Hans Zimmer, all lens flare and slo-mo and drums and strings, the same close-ups of whining tyres and whinnying superchargers. It can do all that and still not thrill the heart in the strange way that Top Gear could.

Abandoning their quest for the tent – and apparently with that also any kind of live, studio format – the first episode cuts into a set piece that lasts the hour, intended “to show off the last stand of internal combustion”, the sunset of the petrol hyper-car. Which isn’t very Milibandist, or very 2026 oil shock, but Amazon is American after all.

So we’re straight to California in three elaborate cars that look like they were designed by Thomas Heatherwick: a Corvette “ZR1”, a Mustang “Grand Touring Daytona” and a Hennessey “Venom F5”. And the three of them do the usual thing: drive around some chaotic, video-game landscapes, get Jenson Button to race the cars for them, and accelerate wildly while attempting Clarksonisms: “Someone poked a bear! A big smelly grizzly bear!” and “I came on boost mid-corner, and I think I might need a change of underwear!”

As for the “three of them”, it’s telling that it takes six paragraphs before you feel the presenters need a full introduction. There’s Thomas Holland, a Canadian with a full beard, and he seems pretty funny, but I’m just not sure showbusiness can handle another Tom Holland of any conjugation. There’s James Engelsman, an English guy with a stubbly half-beard, and they’re clearly attempting some sort of riff about him being “the stupid one” (he thinks it’s a “constellation” prize). And there’s Francis Bourgeois, who became famous as a TikTok trainspotter. I never really got his geek-chic thing, and his shtick of looking surprised to be there. (I’m also surprised he’s there.)

Lacking any especial chemistry as a trio – though Holland and Engelsman have run a car YouTube channel together for several years – the group come across as three guys whose girlfriends happen to be friends. They, therefore, lean hard in to the “cars” side of things, spouting statistics and specifications, and mobilising Amazon’s budget for a high-testosterone race between their vehicles and some American jet planes. But I had seen this before, when Hammond raced a Bugatti against a Eurofighter Typhoon in 2007, and it only made me long for the slapstick challenges and celebrity guests and H Rider Haggard adventuring that made this format such a laugh in the first place. But even that format hasn’t lasted.

If you’ve ever considered rewatching Top Gear, I’d really advise against it. It’s an experience that really is like reading an old newspaper. “Lightning in a bottle” was what Andy Wilman, the long-time Top Gear and Grand Tour producer called the original trio’s chemistry. But when the lightning escapes and the thunder fades, all you’re left holding is an empty bottle.

The Grand Tour
Amazon Prime

[Further reading: Rachel Cusk’s Portmanteau novel]