James May is parting with the 1974 Triumph Stag MKII he drove through Zimbabwe and Botswana in the final episode of “The Grand Tour,” listing it through Collecting Cars. The car carried May through the trio’s farewell to more than two decades of motoring television. Now someone else gets to deal with what he cheerfully describes as one of the most unreliable engines in the world.
May follows Jeremy Clarkson, who has already offloaded three cars from the show. The pattern is clear. The Grand Tour props department is being liquidated, piece by piece, and collectors are the intended audience.
The Stag was the car May always wanted to own, which was the premise of that final episode. Each presenter picked a dream car for the African send-off. May went British, naturally, choosing a 3.0-liter V8 Triumph that had already been restored once before filming.
After surviving its on-screen duties, the car was restored again by Richard Hammond’s workshop, The Smallest Cog. Two restorations and one African desert crossing on a 50-year-old British car feels about right.
The Triumph wears its original Magenta paint and carries enough chrome to blind you in direct sunlight. Bumpers, rocker panels, wing mirrors, window frames, door handles. May admits some of those chrome bits are pitted and could use replacing.
The interior shows its age too, which is what happens when you’re half a century old and have been filmed bouncing across southern Africa.
A few modifications crept in along the way. The speedometer comes from a Mark I model rather than the correct Mark II unit. There’s a modern stereo with Bluetooth, a concession to the 21st century that purists will either forgive or quietly remove.
Under the hood sits the Triumph V8, a 3.0-liter naturally aspirated unit mated to a four-speed manual driving the rear wheels. May’s own description of the engine’s reputation should give any buyer pause. He calls it one of the most unreliable engines ever built, then quickly adds that his particular example has been faultless.
That’s the kind of reassurance that works better coming from someone who isn’t actively trying to sell you the car.
The real question is what a buyer is actually purchasing here. As a Triumph Stag, this is a handsome but flawed British GT from an era when British Leyland was perfecting the art of self-destruction. As a piece of television memorabilia, it carries the weight of a 21-year farewell between three men who invented the modern car show.
The first buyer will almost certainly be paying for the second thing.
Clarkson, Hammond, and May wrapped their partnership in September 2024 with “One for the Road.” The show began as a second act after the Top Gear departure in 2015, and it ran long enough to become its own institution. Now the physical evidence is being scattered to private collections.
No asking price has been listed publicly. Collecting Cars will handle the auction, and the bidding will tell us exactly how much nostalgia is worth when it comes wrapped in Magenta paint and questionable British engineering.
May still has other cars. But fewer of them carry this kind of story, and he knows it.
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