‘Grand Tour’ revs back up
Season 2 returns to what Gear- heads love best.
When viewers tune in for Season 2 of Amazon’s The Grand Tour (the first of 12 weekly episodes began streaming Friday), they’ll discover it’s a lot more like the car-loving trio Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May’s former series, BBC’s Top Gear, than the first season of the new show.
“We looked at the show with a critical eye, because we’re our own best critics, and made some changes based on things we didn’t like, just minutes after we read that everyone else didn’t like them,” May deadpans.
“We’re clever like that,” Hammond chimes in.
In their first season on Amazon, the three tried a little too hard to distance themselves from Top Gear, which collapsed in 2015 after Clarkson was ousted for punching a producer. Some of the new bells and whistles failed to impress longtime viewers — namely, the traveling studio tent, the chatty new American test driver and “Celebrity Brain Crash,” which killed its famous guests before they could set foot in the tent or a car.
The tent now permanently resides within spitting distance of Clarkson’s Southwestern English home. Money spent tearing down and rebuilding the studio every week to set Grand Tour apart from Top Gear (which continues with new hosts) was invested in upgrading the show’s already stunning visuals.
“You can see us drive cars all over the world, which is what we’re sort of known for, as opposed to being in a tent all over the world, which is not really what we’re known for,” May says. “It was a bit of a choice, and we went with the cars and adventure in the end.”
This season’s filmed segments include a muddy trek to Mozambique, where they transported fish to impoverished inland areas; Colorado, where they tried to drive Jaguars down ski slopes; and New York, where they resur- rected an old Top Gear staple by racing different forms of transportation.
The final indication that this season is closer to the old Top Gear: Hammond is having catastrophic accidents, just like old times.
In June, while shooting a segment in Switzerland, he rolled a Rimac Concept One, a Croatian electric sports car worth nearly $1 million, during a timed hill climb, causing it to burst into flames. May was 30 seconds behind him. “I’m not willing to go as far as saying I like Richard Hammond,” May says, “but I was alarmed at the thought that he should have an untimely end that would require me to perhaps say something touching at the memorial service.”
Luckily, Hammond escaped with only a knee injury. But it required surgery and forced him to retire from running, his go-to exercise.
“Now I’ll be as fat as the other two,” he laments.