TL;DR: The new Grand Tour has fast cars, jet planes and three genuinely likeable hosts, but it’s still driving with Clarkson, Hammond and May in the rear-view mirror. Fun? Absolutely. Fresh? Not quite yet.

 

Rebooting The Grand Tour without Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May is a little like rebooting Pokémon and deciding Pikachu can sit this one out. Technically, the concept still works. There are cars. There are ridiculous challenges. There are expensive things travelling at speeds that would make your insurance company spontaneously combust. But for years, the actual engine powering this franchise wasn’t petrol; it was three middle-aged men enthusiastically ruining each other’s day.

Prime Video’s new Grand Tour hands the keys to Thomas Holland, James Engelsman and Francis Bourgeois, and surprisingly, it doesn’t immediately drive into a hedge. The new trio is likeable, genuinely enthusiastic and considerably less interested in behaving like escaped pub regulars than their predecessors. Unfortunately, their first episode is so determined to prove that this is still The Grand Tour that it sometimes feels like watching new players attempt a speedrun using someone else’s save file. There’s plenty of horsepower here, but this reboot desperately needs to unlock its own personality.

Clarkson hands over the keys, sort of

The episode begins by confronting the giant Clarkson-shaped elephant in the garage. Holland, Engelsman and Bourgeois visit Diddly Squat Farm, where Clarkson effectively gives the new generation his blessing. It’s an understandable move because pretending The Grand Tour simply woke up with three different presenters would be hilariously awkward. Still, there’s something amusing about launching your bold new era by immediately visiting the bloke whose shadow you’re desperately trying to escape.

Once the ceremonial transfer of automotive custody is complete, the new presenters head to California, and suddenly we’re comfortably back inside Grand Tour territory. Holland, Engelsman and Bourgeois each get serious machinery, with a Mustang, Corvette and Hennessey entering the automotive arena. There are races. Jenson Button appears. Eventually jet planes become involved because apparently racing only other cars would be dangerously sensible.

It’s spectacular, expensive and reassuringly stupid in exactly the way this franchise should be. Unfortunately, it’s also extremely familiar. You can almost hear the show’s internal checklist being completed: supercars? Check. Beautiful roads? Check. Racing driver? Check. Aircraft introduced because someone found the budget spreadsheet unattended? Absolutely.

The new Grand Tour hosts are dangerously likeable

Thomas Holland and James Engelsman come from automotive YouTube channel Throttle House, while Francis Bourgeois arrives carrying enough train enthusiasm to power Britain’s rail network through sheer excitement. It’s a clever casting strategy because these aren’t random celebrities awkwardly pretending to care about horsepower. They are enthusiasts, and that enthusiasm gives the reboot an authenticity it desperately needs.

Bourgeois is particularly fascinating because he possesses the energy of someone who has just discovered that enthusiasm has no legal upper limit. There’s an endearing sincerity to him that feels almost rebellious in a television landscape where everyone is usually trying very hard to look effortlessly cool. Holland and Engelsman bring more traditional automotive confidence, giving the trio enough contrasting ingredients that you can imagine a genuinely entertaining dynamic eventually emerging.

The key word, unfortunately, is eventually.

Right now, they’re almost too pleasant with each other. Clarkson, Hammond and May operated like a Dungeons & Dragons party where everyone had deliberately selected incompatible alignments. Their arguments, insults and petty sabotage often became more entertaining than whatever automotive challenge they were supposedly completing. Holland, Engelsman and Bourgeois currently feel more like three guys who would politely remind each other that somebody left their phone charger at the hotel.

That isn’t necessarily bad. Trying to manufacture arguments would be painfully obvious, and cosplay Clarkson would be the fastest possible route to disaster. But The Grand Tour needs personality almost as much as it needs cars, and this trio hasn’t yet discovered the specific flavour of chaos that belongs to them.

The cars are fast, but the formula is stuck in traffic

The California setting gives the reboot plenty of opportunity to remind us why automotive television can still be ridiculously enjoyable. Powerful cars, huge landscapes and beautifully excessive challenges remain inherently watchable. Adding Jenson Button and eventually racing jet aircraft ensures the episode maintains the franchise’s traditional philosophy that anything worth doing is worth doing with unnecessary amounts of horsepower and somebody nervously checking the production insurance.

The bigger problem is that we’ve played this level before.

A lot.

After decades of Top Gear and The Grand Tour, the supercar-challenge-road-trip formula has been squeezed harder than a controller during a Dark Souls boss fight. Worse, automotive YouTube has exploded in the meantime. Viewers can now find beautifully shot car reviews, insane builds, drag races, track tests and deeply nerdy engineering breakdowns without waiting for a streaming service to spend several million dollars launching a Corvette towards the horizon.

That means The Grand Tour can no longer survive purely because it has bigger toys. It needs personality.

There’s one encouraging moment when Holland jokes about billionaires while visiting an expensive private racetrack, including a cheeky remark about not paying taxes. It’s a small moment, but it suggests the new presenters might eventually become comfortable enough to develop sharper edges. That’s exactly what the reboot needs: not Clarkson-style provocation copied and pasted into 2026, but its own mischievous willingness to poke at things.

Stop trying to replace Clarkson and start breaking things

The most exciting version of this reboot isn’t one where Holland becomes Clarkson 2.0, Engelsman gets assigned the May slot and Bourgeois is told to run around being Hammond. Nobody wins that game. Clarkson, Hammond and May developed their chemistry across years of television, and trying to recreate it instantly would feel about as natural as three strangers being introduced at Comic-Con and immediately told they’re now lifelong best friends.

Instead, The Grand Tour should lean harder into what makes these presenters different. Let Bourgeois be aggressively enthusiastic. Let Holland and Engelsman’s existing automotive knowledge shape the show. Let their disagreements emerge naturally. Give them challenges that reflect their personalities instead of constantly making them perform rituals inherited from the old series.

Because underneath all the familiarity, I can see potential here. These hosts don’t annoy me. Quite the opposite: I want to spend more time with them. That’s an important victory for any reboot attempting to replace one of television’s most recognisable presenting teams.

The problem is that I currently want to see more of them and slightly less of The Grand Tour pretending nothing has changed.

Verdict

The new Grand Tour hasn’t crashed, exploded or accidentally reversed into a lake, which already makes this reboot more successful than many of the vehicles associated with its predecessors. Thomas Holland, James Engelsman and Francis Bourgeois are enthusiastic, charming and different enough that I can absolutely imagine them becoming a genuinely entertaining trio once the politeness wears off and they discover exactly how to push each other’s buttons.

The cars remain glorious, the production still knows how to make horsepower look cinematic, and racing jet planes is precisely the sort of gloriously unnecessary nonsense I want from a programme called The Grand Tour. But the first episode spends too much time playing the franchise’s greatest hits instead of writing new material.

Existing fans should absolutely give it a chance, particularly anyone capable of discussing torque figures for longer than most people discuss their children. But the reboot now needs to stop asking whether these presenters can continue Clarkson, Hammond and May’s Grand Tour. The interesting question is what happens when Holland, Engelsman and Bourgeois finally steal the keys, disable the parental controls and turn it into their show.