I wonder how pissed off the Croatian company was that Hammond wrecked their amazingly cool electric super car? And not just wrecked, but totally destroyed. That looked pretty horrific, but it seems like he escaped without serious injury. Very glad about that. Hammond has always been my favorite of the three.
I’m glad they retained Conversation Street, as it’s one of the best segments. Happy they trashed Celebrity Brain Crash too, as it sucked from Day One. Not sure I care much about the replacement, it’s too similar to their old “star in a car” segments, though I did enjoy the interview portion with Hasselhoff and the English guy.
This was a great season overall, but I was pretty disappointed in the season-ending special in Mozambique. The previous Africa special they did on Top Gear was much more interesting than this one, and I couldn’t stop comparing the two in my head. My main beef with it is just how monotonous the actual journey was to the place they were going. It was on a single road, and the road itself was either slippery sand or deep mud. In the other Africa special where they were searching for the source of the Nile, there was so much variety in terrain and roads, and mountains and mud and rocks and gravel and breaking down of cars. That still remains my favorite Top Gear episode.
Mozambique was interesting in that it was another reminder how undeveloped Africa still is. China has its work cut out for it if they’re going to tame the interior of this continent with roads and railways.
I struggled with this season. The rough edges from season 1 were sanded off – everything basically worked. It was competent. I think maybe the cranky old guy shtick is wearing off for me. Then at the mid-season point, they killed a bunch of sheep while messing around. I wanted to bail right then, and I’m mad at myself for sticking around to the end.
My son and I are catching up on this now. We just saw the episode where Hammond drives that amazing tracked vehicle through the streets of Dubai. I cannot believe they got permission to do that, and to drive around in the shopping mall with a 4-ton vehicle. That had to put a lot of stress on the architecture given it was tooling around on the second floor.
One thing that is rapidly turning me off about this season : It seems to be becoming the Jeremy Clarkson show. Now, I like Jeremy, but in small doses and diluted heavily with lots of May and Hammond. The past couple of episodes I’ve watched he’s literally taken over the show, doing nearly all the voiceover segments, interviewing every guest, and dominating all the conversations. It’s getting old quickly, as is the new celebrity car segment, which seems to have dumped any pretense of using actual celebrities to instead get Brits we’ve never heard of to come talk to Jeremy for 15 minutes instead. Ugh.
I watched the first episode of the new season at my brother’s place yesterday. Good stuff! I’m very happy that the show is back. The McLaren Senna looks pretty incredible. I’ll have to track it down in a Forza game now. I love supercars with freakishly good brakes. It helps speed up lap times so much.
The Detroit features throughout the episode were great too. I had no idea Detroit was the richest city in America not that long ago.
Every time I see stuff on Detroit i see these wonderfully styled brick houses slowly rotting away. The house they “bought” for $2200 was gorgeous. It seems Detroit money was at its peak at the best time for that style and era. (40s-50s at a guess) Does it have a name?
I finished Season 3. Great season. The Mongolia special was really different from all their previous ones. And then to spend the last episode saying goodbye to all these Ford cars that I’ve never heard of was interesting. I had no idea the U.K. had all these lines of Ford cars built there that were so popular. And then they transitioned to saying goodbye to the audience, since it’s effectively their last show. That was pretty sad. I’m glad the BBC let them have permission to show all their old footage from Top Gear as part of their montage to say goodbye.
Still, we’re getting further adventures next season. It’s just that the test track will be gone, and the tent, and conversation street, etc. It wasn’t until their goodbye that I realized that this was actually a pretty decent chunk of the show. Forza 4 introduced the Top Gear test track and the Star in a Reasonably Priced Car challenge, and that was so much fun to participate in. It’s a shame we never got the same treatment from the Grand Tour’s test track.
I finally watched the first episode of Season 3 and I never stopped smiling the entire time. The spoiler above about the ending is kind of a downer though.
I was always hot/cold about the tent stuff. ‘Conversation Street’ could be fun at times but most of the other stuff was meh and them just setting up the videos. Don’t think it will be missed that much.
Oh now Im interested. Ford Dagenham was close to where I grew up, lots of m8s dads worked there. Many came over from the Caribbean in the 50s to do so. We all grew up driving Fords as I came of age during peak boy racer hothatch era. Our cars were Fiesta Supersports, XR2s and 3s, RS Cossies, a few older brothers with Capris and someones dad even had a Tickford Turbo. Have a few m8s who are proper Ford enthusiasts too, one guy does MkI Escorts to rally or drag spec.
Wasnt keen on the Grand Tour track though. The Top Gear is the only one that matters.
That’s where I stand on it too. They really struggled for tent content outside of conversation street it seemed. Their best episodes were their long form excursions. Mongolia, Columbia, etc.
I probably won’t miss tent content too much either. A part of me was hoping the Grand Tour test track was around long enough to eventually become like the Top Gear test track, with a huge number of cars tested on it, with the track showing up in games too. But oh well, as it is, I only care about the Top Gear one, the Grand Tour wasn’t around long enough.
Ha! And I thought I was behind everyone by posting it months after it first aired. :)
