The Grand Tour Review: The Keys Change Hands

Replacing all three presenters at once should make The Grand Tour feel like a hostage exchange. Instead, the stranger thing is how little the programme itself changes. James Engelsman and Thomas Holland arrive from the YouTube channel Throttle House, while Francis Bourgeois joins them after becoming famous for getting extremely excited about trains.

Their first assignment is suitably ceremonial: drive to Diddly Squat Farm, stand before Jeremy Clarkson and receive permission to touch the family silver. Clarkson wishes them luck, warns them not to mess things up and refuses to hand over the old travelling tent.

Then the reboot behaves almost exactly like The Grand Tour. The premiere sends the trio to California, hands Engelsman a Corvette, Holland a Mustang and Bourgeois a yellow Hennessey Venom F5 Revolution Evo, then lets Prime Video’s production budget do what Prime Video production budgets tend to do.

Desert highways glow. Engines howl. Cameras skim inches above asphalt. Jenson Button turns up. Aerobatic aircraft arrive because simply racing three extraordinarily fast cars would apparently constitute an unacceptable outbreak of restraint.

The handover works because nobody pretends these presenters can instantly reproduce Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May. The show wisely gives them room to be smaller personalities inside the same enormous frame. For now, anyway.

Three Men and Several Million Horsepower

Engelsman and Holland already know how to perform together. Their exchanges over specifications, speed and mechanical absurdities have the easy timing of people who have spent years standing beside expensive machinery with cameras pointed at them. That polish brings its own problem. The Grand Tour depends upon planned sequences appearing one loose bolt away from catastrophe. Here, you can occasionally see the bolts.

During the California track test, Bourgeois suddenly rockets between Engelsman and Holland in his Hennessey while both are travelling at substantial speed. It is spectacular television. Their surprise is harder to buy. Everyone involved presumably encountered enough safety paperwork to stun an ox.

Bourgeois is where the new chemistry becomes interesting. His enthusiasm has no volume control. When the group drives beside a freight train in California, his entire face changes. Engelsman and Holland recognize the opportunity and mostly get out of the way, turning into straight men while Bourgeois reacts like someone has accidentally constructed heaven beside the motorway.

He is equally useful because the programme keeps finding contradictions inside him. Bourgeois has the cautious rule-following streak of the child who reminded the teacher about homework, yet he drives the Venom without displaying much interest in continued life. His engineering knowledge gives him authority, while his delivery keeps that knowledge from becoming a lecture.

Engelsman and Holland still need sharper identities around him. Their friendship is pleasant, their disagreements mild and their laughter frequent. Television friendship needs friction. Otherwise you have three men having a lovely holiday, which is terrific for them.

The Old Tricks Still Work

The season improves when the challenges create situations the presenters cannot smooth away. A trip involving tiny Japanese Kei cars becomes one of the better examples. The trio take vehicles such as the Honda Acty and Suzuki Alto into an American landscape dominated by giant pickups, arguing for the usefulness of machines with modest dimensions and even more modest horsepower. Then comes the school bus.

To disguise cars that create legal difficulties on American roads, the show places them beneath sections of a school-bus shell. It is exactly the sort of beautifully stupid visual gag this format has spent decades perfecting: a ridiculous solution that creates several new problems before fixing the first one.

Trips through the Angolan desert, Malaysia’s modified-car scene, Pikes Peak and the Belgian Grand Prix keep the geography changing while preserving the usual structure. Pick questionable vehicles. Establish an objective. Add an obstacle that somebody sensible would have identified during planning. Damage machinery. Complain over radios. None of this feels new. Much of it remains very watchable.

The photography still sells scale particularly well. California’s empty roads make the supercars look heroic before the edit cuts back to three presenters squabbling inside them. At the private Thermal Club, pristine tarmac and villas stuffed with exotic cars turn wealth into production design. The billionaire jokes land because the location has already delivered the punchline visually.

The trouble arrives whenever spectacle has to impersonate spontaneity. A jet race looks expensive. A battered Kei car trying to sneak through town dressed as public transport feels alive. Guess which one is funnier.

A Reboot Looking Backwards

The strangest tension comes from Amazon hiring younger presenters while preserving attitudes inherited from an older version of motoring television. The California episode presents petrol-powered sports cars as heroic resistance to electric vehicles. It gives the reboot an odd generational split. The faces have changed; the argument appears to have been left in Clarkson’s glovebox.

The Kei-car material offers a smarter direction. Placing tiny Japanese utility vehicles against oversized American pickups lets the cars create the argument themselves. Holland can mock the antisocial scale of giant trucks while the trio struggle across rough terrain in machines that look capable of being stored in a kitchen cupboard. The joke has mechanical consequences, which gives it teeth.

There are similar sparks at the private racetrack. Holland stage-whispers about not paying taxes, and Bourgeois identifies being a billionaire as the new American dream while standing beside an absurdly expensive car. On an Amazon programme, that qualifies as nibbling the hand that feeds you.

The appearances by Clarkson, Hammond and May are less useful. Their presence is supposed to pass the torch, yet each cameo reminds viewers whose shadows the newcomers are standing in. The reboot feels most confident once the veterans disappear and Bourgeois starts talking about trains, Holland gets irritated by something mechanical and Engelsman has to deal with both of them. The Grand Tour has already proved its new trio can operate the machinery. The entertaining question is what happens once they stop asking permission to scratch the paint.

The Grand Tour returned to Amazon Prime Video on September 4, 2026, introducing a fresh era for the motoring series. The reboot features new presenters tackling demanding vehicular challenges while retaining global adventures and humorous stunts.

Where to Watch The Grand Tour Online

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Amazon Prime Video

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Source: JustWatch

Full Credits

• Title: The Grand Tour

• Distributor: Amazon Prime Video

• Release date: September 4, 2026

• Rating: TV-14

• Running time: 50 minutes

• Director: Phil Churchward, Brian Klein, Kit Lynch-Robinson, Gavin Whitehead

• Producers and Executive Producers: Andy Wilman, Phil Churchward, Alex Renton, Nia Yemoh, Tim Harcourt, Stephen Lambert

• Cast: Francis Bourgeois, James Engelsman, Thomas Holland, Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, James May

• Composer: Matt Clifford