Amazon Prime will drop six new episodes of The Grand Tour on September 4, marking the first season without Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May behind the wheel. The trio that defined a generation of automotive television has been replaced by YouTube’s Throttle House duo, James Engelsman and Thomas Holland, and TikTok railway enthusiast Francis Bourgeois.
That’s a Canadian car-review channel and a British trainspotter inheriting arguably the most watched car show on the planet. Let that settle for a moment.
Amazon announced the new hosts back in February but rolled them out again last week with a fresh Instagram campaign tagged “Same show. New knobs.” The self-deprecating humor is deliberate. The streamer knows exactly how much skepticism it’s walking into and is trying to defuse it before the first frame airs.
The original Grand Tour was itself a successor, born when Clarkson, Hammond, and May left BBC’s Top Gear in 2015 after Clarkson’s infamous fracas with a producer. They carried their chemistry to Amazon and proved the audience followed the personalities, not the brand. That lesson cuts both ways now. Without the original three, The Grand Tour is just a title card and a budget.
Amazon is betting the format can survive a transplant. The new season promises Angola desert crossings in track cars, a deep dive into Malaysian car culture, performance testing in California, and what’s described cryptically as “challenging an entire nation’s legal system.” On paper, it reads like the kind of ambitious, continent-hopping filmmaking that made the show’s specials appointment viewing. Whether the new hosts can generate real friction and comedy inside those set pieces is the only question that matters.
Engelsman and Holland aren’t unknowns. Throttle House has built a loyal following on YouTube with car reviews that balance technical depth and genuine rapport. They’re polished, funny, and comfortable on camera. But YouTube chemistry and prestige-TV chemistry are different animals. A seven-minute review shot in a parking lot doesn’t prepare you for a 50-minute narrative filmed across three countries with a crew of dozens.
Then there’s Bourgeois. The 25-year-old became a viral sensation filming himself spotting trains with an infectious, unfiltered joy that made him a brand ambassador for Gucci and North Face. He is not, by any traditional measure, a car guy. Amazon clearly sees him as the wildcard, the enthusiastic outsider meant to broaden the show’s appeal and create the kind of fish-out-of-water moments that once belonged to James May’s deliberate cluelessness.
Clarkson himself blessed the new lineup in a February video where he theatrically sorted through host applications, rejecting candidates for facial hair and for being James May. It was charming, calculated, and exactly the kind of torch-passing gesture designed to give longtime fans permission to tune in.
Six episodes available to binge on day one is a telling choice. Amazon isn’t dripping these out weekly to build buzz. It’s dumping the whole season at once, letting viewers form their verdict in a weekend rather than enduring weeks of social media dissection. That’s either supreme confidence or a hedge, getting the conversation over with quickly and assessing whether a second season makes sense.
The Clarkson-Hammond-May era lasted across two shows and more than two decades. It survived controversies, network changes, and the hosts visibly aging out of their own stunts. What it couldn’t survive was time. The final Grand Tour special aired in late 2024, and the three men went their separate ways, Clarkson to his farm empire, Hammond to smaller projects, May to quiet semi-retirement.
What Amazon is really asking is whether The Grand Tour is a show or a relationship. Millions of viewers tuned in to watch three middle-aged men argue about cars. September 4 will tell us if they were watching the cars.
Share this Story