Amazon handed The Grand Tour to three YouTubers — the one who went viral for loving trains just stole the whole show
Two years ago, Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May drove off into the Botswana sunset, and an entire generation of dads went into mourning.
Amazon, a company not known for letting a beloved cash cow wander off to graze, had other plans. The Grand Tour is back as of this Friday — six episodes, same title, same absurd budget — and the three men now holding the keys have a combined broadcast television experience of approximately zero.
The lineup, for those who don't live on YouTube
- James Engelsman and Thomas Holland, the duo behind Throttle House, the car-review channel with 3.4 million subscribers that fans spent years calling the spiritual successor to Top Gear. Richard Hammond did a cameo on their channel before any of this was even a rumor, which in hindsight looks less like a coincidence and more like a job interview.
- Francis Bourgeois, the man your algorithm served you in 2021: fisheye lens strapped to his head, shrieking with unfiltered joy at a passing freight train. Six million followers. Also, quietly, a qualified mechanical engineer who's done time at Rolls-Royce, because life is not fair.
Yes, the trainspotter. On a car show. And here's the thing nobody was ready to admit out loud: he's the best part of it.
They knew exactly how this looked
Nobody involved was delusional about the shoes they were stepping into. The announcement came with the tagline "New Show. Same Knobs," which tells you the self-awareness levels were healthy from day one.
"When I first heard they were rebooting The Grand Tour and replacing Clarkson, Hammond and May, I said 'only a moron would take that job,'" Holland admitted.
Bourgeois went with a more scenic route to the same conclusion:
"The saying 'big shoes to fill' spring to mind. Well, in this case it'll be like Mo Farah running in size 14 wellies — it'll be a little awkward at first, perhaps blister-inducing, but will overall be an interesting watch."
A man who compares his own career move to a distance runner in oversized rubber boots is a man built for this franchise.
The actual show
The format survived the transplant intact: track cars across the Angolan desert, a deep dive into Malaysia's car culture, performance machines in California, and at least one segment involving sticking pieces of a school bus onto a microcar, because some traditions are sacred.
Is the banter occasionally stilted? Sure — these are three people who've known each other for five minutes, on camera, replacing three people who bickered like a married throuple for two decades. But Bourgeois's whole deal — deep-nerd knowledge delivered in the softest voice on television — lands him squarely in the James May lineage, and the internet already survived one round of trying to prove his enthusiasm is fake. It isn't. It's contagious. The trains won. Let the trains win again.
