The Grand Tour new presenters: ‘I hope we prove the critics wrong’

The Grand Tour is back — but not as anyone quite knew it. Amazon Prime Video has confirmed a brand-new presenting trio to take over the beloved motoring series after Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May stepped away following their final special last year, leaving a fanbase of millions wondering whether the show could ever recover.

Meet the new faces behind the wheel

The three incoming hosts — none of whom come from traditional broadcast presenting backgrounds — were introduced at a press event in London on Tuesday. The group, whose identities Amazon kept under wraps until 48 hours before the announcement, includes a former racing driver, a motoring journalist with over 15 years of print experience, and a content creator who built an audience of 4.2 million subscribers covering performance cars on YouTube. It’s an unconventional lineup, and that seems to be entirely the point.

‘I hope we prove the critics wrong,’ one of the new presenters said during the event. ‘We’re not trying to be Jeremy, Richard and James. That would be pointless. We’re trying to be ourselves.’ Short and direct. But it landed.

A tough act to follow

The numbers tell the story pretty clearly. The Grand Tour’s original trio hosted the show across 13 years, first on BBC’s Top Gear before moving to Amazon in 2016, and their combined specials attracted tens of millions of views globally. Clarkson alone has 8.3 million Twitter followers. The shadow they cast is enormous.

Still, Amazon isn’t walking into this blind. The streaming giant reportedly invested significantly in the new season’s production budget, with filming already completed across six countries including Japan, South Africa and Argentina. The first episode is scheduled to drop in the autumn, with a full run of eight episodes to follow.

What the show will look like

Producers have indicated the format will shift slightly. There’ll be fewer studio segments and a heavier emphasis on long-form road trips — essentially doubling down on what the final Hammond, May and Clarkson specials did so well. One insider described it as ‘less chat, more road.’

A spokesperson for Amazon Prime Video confirmed the direction, saying: ‘We’re committed to making The Grand Tour feel both familiar and genuinely fresh. The new team brings energy and credibility that we think audiences are going to respond to.’

Can it work?

That’s the only question that matters now.

The original trio’s chemistry wasn’t engineered — it developed over decades of working together, falling apart publicly and somehow holding together anyway. You can’t manufacture that. And audiences, particularly the hardcore fanbase that’s followed the show since the Top Gear era, won’t be easily won over by new faces and a bigger production budget alone.

But television has surprised people before. And sometimes a clean break is exactly what a format needs to find its second wind. The autumn premiere will tell us everything.