“WE DON’T know how it’s going to feel when it’s finally gone yet,” admits presenter Richard Hammond of bringing The Grand Tour to an end with a final special, One For The Road, which puts the brakes on eight years of globe-trotting car-based adventures.
“It won’t be until a few months have passed and then there isn’t another episode coming along that we’ll all realise, ‘Ooh, that’s how it feels not to be doing this’.”
“It doesn’t stop as suddenly as people imagine,” agrees co-presenter James May, who fronted BBC motoring show Top Gear alongside Hammond and Jeremy Clarkson for 13 years before the trio departed to create Prime Video’s car-crazed competitor in 2016.
“There isn’t a point at which you just think, ‘Right, that’s over - I’ll go to the pub’. It’s not really like that, I’m afraid.
“We’re a bit like World War One veterans - we are fading away.”
For their last hurrah, the trio have returned to Africa, the setting for their very first foreign road trip adventure on Top Gear back in 2007, driving three of their all-time favourite vehicles – a Mk1 Ford Capri 3.0 (Hammond), a Triumph Stag (May) and a Lancia Montecarlo (Clarkson) - across Zimbabwe.
Poignantly, the series draws to a close with another nostalgia-packed excursion across the Makgadikgadi salt flats to Kubu Island in neighbouring Botswana, where the three concluded that original Top Gear adventure almost 20 years ago.
“I’ve always wanted to go to Zimbabwe,” enthuses Clarkson of choosing a fitting location for The Grand Tour’s final instalment.
“For years the BBC weren’t allowed into Zimbabwe, but Amazon is allowed – so the lightbulb suddenly clicked on.
“Although we’ve done some very memorable and enjoyable specials over the years, the three of us have always agreed that Botswana was our favourite, probably because it was our first – and so there is nostalgia to that.”
One For The Road comes fully-loaded with the usual abundance of stunningly cinematic scenery, wildly varying road surfaces, comedic wrong turns and obstacle-overcoming feats of automotive ingenuity that viewers have come to expect from the Prime Video series.
However, the presenters and long-time producer Andy Wilman were keen to garage The Grand Tour by dialling down big stunts and spectacular set-pieces in favour of the core elements of a Clarkson/May/Hammond road-trip: hard driving, wild camping - with the odd luxury hotel thrown in as a ‘retirement’ bonus - plenty of hilarious breakdown related hi-jinx and an abundance of matey banter.
“I think we wanted to strip away all the contrived stuff and go back to basics,” admits Clarkson, who is rumoured to be putting his other Prime Video hit, Clarkson’s Farm, out to pasture in the near future.
“We wanted to do a simple ‘this is just us driving across Africa’, which is a happy place. And I didn’t want anything big at the end – that Michael Bay thing of ‘let’s have some jet fighters crashing into you’.
“I think what Andy has created is really, really good. You’ve got to care about the fact that we’re not doing this anymore, and he’s done that.”
“I think the last show is what we really wanted it to be,” agrees Hammond, who will still be keeping his hands oily over on Discovery Plus with Richard Hammond’s Workshop, centred on the money-haemorrhaging exploits of his classic car-orientated garage, The Smallest Cog.
“It’s not all the bells and whistles and big craziness. It’s actually quite stripped-out. It’s us three being who we are, doing what we do. And it is a thank you: a lot of people have stayed with us for those two decades, so we wanted to acknowledge the moment and say ‘thank-you for watching, because if you hadn’t been watching, we couldn’t have done it’.”
He then turns to May and asks: “Am I being too soppy?”
“I’ll allow you this bit of soppiness,” responds the famously even-tempered car enthusiast, nicknamed ‘Captain Slow’ by his co-presenters.
“This show is a little bit sentimental from the off, and we decided it should be that beforehand: We’re in place that we always wanted to go, in cars that we loved when we were young.
“We’re aware that it is emotionally quite charged. I mean, there are some stunts in it [Volkswagen Beetle lovers prepare to cover your eyes], but it doesn’t really rely on that.
“Basically, we knew it would be formed entirely around our thoughts at the end of a remarkably lucky period, a third of my whole adult life and half of my working life, if we can call it that, coming to a close. So we let that speak for itself, really. And I think you can tell it has a different character.”
One revelation in the final show which will rock the Top Gear/GT fanbase to its core is that Jeremy Clarkson has been travelling the world for the guts of the past two decades with a Lancia Beta headlamp in his luggage - a sentimental souvenir from the car he drove in that aforementioned Top Gear Botswana Special back in 2007.
Happily, the trio have also kept a few of the cars which they have used and abused for our entertainment over the years - including their final three steeds.
“The Capri has survived,” confirms Hammond of his yellow 1974 3.0 GXL, which proves itself to be somewhat unreliable (to put it mildly) when faced with Africa-spec terrain.
“I am probably going to restore it - but I’ll leave it as it is for a while, because we are going to take it to a few Drive Tribe shows and I think people quite like to see these things with all the dust and the cracks and the marks.
“I chose a Capri because I wanted my first car to be a Capri but ended up with a Toyota Corolla. So my last car, as far as this career is concerned, is a Capri. I’ll always keep it, and will probably make it all minty and lovely sometime next year so I can use it.”
“Well, my Triumph Stag is also with Richard Hammond’s Smallest Cog workshop - and they haven’t even looked at it yet,” reveals James May, whose upcoming Channel 5 series The Great Explorers will delve into the exploits of outwardly-bound historical figures including James Cook, Christopher Columbus and Sir Walter Raleigh.
“That’s because you still need to discuss what you want,” retorts an exasperated Hammond.
With Jeremy Clarkson’s Lancia Montecarlo also safely repatriated and in need of restoration, it’s nice to know that while The Grand Tour might have reached the end of its road, Clarkson, May and Hammond surely still have plenty of classic car-based bickering ahead of them.
Sounds like a great idea for a TV series...
