"...back in the spring [of 2015], as you probably remember, I suddenly became... unbusy."

— Jeremy Clarkson, Amazon Fire TV ad

The Grand Tour is a motoring show on Prime Video that debuted on November 17, 2016. Amazon initially picked up the show for 36 episodes, spread across three seasons. Episodes (in a departure at the time) stuck to a "broadcast"-style model and debuted weekly, instead of having a whole season released at once like many other streaming shows.

The show is hosted by Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May, who were the presenters of the second iteration of The BBC programme Top Gear that ran from 2002-2015. Their Vitriolic Best Buds rapport, along with their combination of car knowledge and absurd antics, turned that show into a global phenomenon, and Amazon has captured a similar flavor with The Grand Tour. The show is co-produced by the presenters, along with former Top Gear producer Andy Wilman.

Episodes feature segments ranging from semi-serious car reviews, many extravagant stunts, and some difficult trips, all filmed in various places around the world. The presenters introduce and discuss each episode from inside a giant tent in the Cotswolds in front of a large audience ^note For the first season, the tent also moved from place to place, starting in South Africa and ending in Dubai, but due to costs and the presenters' health, it was given a permanent home. They also engage in segments such as "Conversation Street" where they discuss current events in motoring, and "Celebrity Face Off", where two celebrities from the same field race around the same track, trying to be the fastest. There is also a test track in a top secret location ^note Actually, near Swindon, if you're interested that happens to be shaped like the Ebola virus, and so has been dubbed the Eboladrome, where they test out various cars and send them around a timed lap with a test driver. For the first season, they used NASCAR driver Mike Skinner (billed as The American) to perform test laps; for the second, Skinner was replaced by British GT driver Abbie Eaton.

The Grand Tour's first few episodes debuted first only in the U.K., U.S., Japan, and Germany (countries that offer Amazon's yearly Prime membership), but on December 13, 2016, it became available nearly globally via Amazon's Prime Video website. Wilman expressed an interest in licensing or syndicating the show for broadcast, outside of Internet streaming, so it can eventually be seen by as many viewers as possible — and in October 2017, the first season started broadcasting on Australia's Channel Seven, the show's first appearance outside of Amazon.

The run-up to the series, considering the history of the presenters' time at Top Gear, and the circumstances that led to its creation, made for considerable coverage on social media and in the UK press. To make a very long and controversial story short, Jeremy Clarkson's contract for Top Gear was not renewed in March 2015 after a physical altercation with one of the show's producers. A few weeks later, May, Hammond, and Wilman opted not to renew their contracts for the show, and so subsequently left with Clarkson after the end of the show's 22nd series.

The four then began looking for an outlet to begin again with a new show. A deal was eventually struck between Amazon Studios and the quartet's new production company, "W. Chump & Sons" ^note The "W" is for Wilman, and "Chump" contains the first initials of Clarkson, Hammond, and May, respectively., and they were offered a generous amount of money (said to be in the neighborhood of $250 million) to make three seasons of their at-the-time still-unnamed show. After a long, long period of comical Internet bickering, fan debate, and serious legal wrangling, the show was christened The Grand Tour in May 2016.

As part of the show's global tone, and also due to the larger budget afforded them, the series travels around the world and to (arguably) more far-flung locations than in comparison with Top Gear. The first tent setup and subsequent audience filming were in Johannesburg, South Africa on July 17, 2016, with the final audience segments taped for the last episode of the first season recorded in Dubai, UAE on December 10, 2016.

Filming started on the second season not soon after the first season wrapped ^note in fact, a segment for Season 2 that takes place in Dubai was filmed the same time they were there to do the last audience taping for Season 1. The filming had its share of peril; Richard Hammond was involved in two accidents — a motorcycle accident in Mozambique in March 2017, and a crash in a supercar in Switzerland in June that was far more serious, but from fortunately he escaped with only a fractured knee and has since recovered. The second season's 11 episodes began streaming on December 8, 2017.

Season 3 released from January 18 to April 12, 2019, visiting locations like China, France, and Sweden. Amazon Game Studios (co-developing with Heavy Iron Studios) also released an Xbox and PlayStation 4 game based on the series, including tracks based on locations of the first two series (along with the Eboladrome track) with new DLC arriving after each Season 3 episode until the season was complete.

On December 13, 2018, Amazon announced that it would pick the show up for further seasons. However, going forward the show would ditch the audience and tent, and be comprised only of long-form episodes in the style of the single-trip "Specials" like the ones filmed in Namibia, Columbia, and Mongolia. In an odd twist of fate, it was announced in 2019 that Wilman and the presenters were folding W. Chump & Sons and moving production of future episodes of The Grand Tour to Expectation, a production company ironically backed by their former employers, the BBC.

The Grand Tour Presents specials (considered Seasons 4, 5, and 6) are:

• Seamen (S4 E1; December 13th, 2019), featuring a boating trip through the Mekong Delta, starting in Cambodia and ending in Vietnam.
• A Massive Hunt (S4 E2; December 17, 2020), filmed on the French island of Reunion and Madagascar.
• Lochdown (S4 E3; July 30, 2021), filmed in Scotland once the COVID-19 Pandemic prohibited international travel.
• Carnage A Trois (S4 E4; December 17, 2021), still limited to the UK and focusing on French cars.
• A Scandi Flick (S5 E1; September 16, 2022), filmed in Norway, Sweden, and Finland.
• Eurocrash (S5 E2; June 16, 2023), filmed in Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Slovenia.
• Sand Job (S5 E3; February 16, 2024), which had the presenters using modified used cars to ape the Dakar rally route across the Sahara Desert in Mauritania.
• One for the Road (S6 E1; September 13, 2024), filmed in Zimbabwe as the trio's last grand adventure together before going their separate ways.

Shortly after the filming in Zimbabwe late in 2023, Clarkson posted on Instagram that eventual episode would mark the end of The Grand Tour — while at the same time confirming the renewal of a third series of his other Amazon show, Clarkson's Farm, which had been in doubt after his remarks on Meghan Markle landed him in hot water (again). May and Hammond, who had launched their own shows on Amazon and Discovery+ respectively (in the case of May, more than one), and also generate content for their shared websites DriveTribe and What Next, seemed to echo that sentiment in the press.

Amazon will continue the show with other presenters, but the Clarkson/Hammond/May era has come to an end after 22 years of the three presenting together.

This show provides examples of:

• Actor Allusion: James May seems remarkably competent when it comes to reassembling a 4x4 vehicle from crates of parts in the Mongolian Special. He even bothers to lay all the parts out nice and neatly before starting, like he's done that sort of thing before.
• Acquired Error at the Printer: A feature of the show's opening in the first season, as audience taping was done in various cities around the world. A sign would welcome the presenters, but the last one listed will have their name misspelled. For example: "Richard Hammond, James May, and Germy Clarkson," or perhaps "Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and Jams Made."
• Actually Pretty Funny:
  • The Conversation Street intro for "It's a Gas Gas Gas" features Hammond with a ridiculously large stream of water gushing from his mouth. Clarkson replies with "That's the best thing that's going to come out of your mouth for the next seven minutes," eliciting a hearty laugh from Hammond.
  • During the Colombia special, Hammond and May constantly make jokes and supportive remarks about Clarkson having "come out" due to him driving a Jeep Wrangler, which they associate with the gay community. Clarkson is generally unamused by them until...
    Clarkson: [stuck in a ditch and asking May for help] Could you give me a tow 'cause I'm... invokedNo, I'm very close to coming out.
    Hammond: Well, we know that. You've brought a Jeep — Oh, I see.
    [Clarkson erupts with laughter as he realises what he just said]
  • From earlier in the same episode, May and Hammond both encourage Clarkson to moisturize.
    Clarkson: Why should I moisturize?
    May: Because you're dry. You look like something found in a pyramid.
    Clarkson: Anyway, listen, we must turn our attention...
    [Hammond begins laughing, followed by Clarkson, followed by May]
  • Hammond's reaction in "Seamen" on finally noticing his boat had been renamed the "Jizzle Drizzle" is to burst into delighted laughter. The laughter continues even as he realizes just how many people have seen him piloting a boat with said name.
  • In A Scandi Flick, as Hammond and May argue that Clarkson's Audi RS4 doesn't meet the challenge requirements, Clarkson tries to defend his choice:
    Clarkson: I am older, and with age has come—
    Hammond: —weight.
    [Clarkson doubles over laughing]
  • In Eurocrash, Clarkson and Hammond attempt to try their hand at Formula Eastern. Clarkson is too big to fit in any of the cars, and when he tries to get out, he gets stuck. Hammond finds this hilarious and spends the whole time poking fun at Clarkson's weight, and Clarkson, despite his disappointment at being unable to compete, spends the whole time laughing at Hammond's jibes. Later, when May pranks him by lining the inside of his car with Dalmatian-patterned faux fur, Clarkson privately admits that he actually quite likes it.
• The Alleged Car: In a show about cars, it's inevitable...
  • In Season 1, Episode 4, "Enviro-mental", the presenters are each given a Land Rover Discovery and told to replace all its body panels with sustainable materials. Clarkson uses animal bones, skin and flesh, Hammond uses various plants, and May uses (variously) mud, bricks, and straw packed together with dung. In true Top Gear tradition, all three were this trope:
    • After having to replace pieces scavenged by dogs with raw meat and bone straight from a butcher's shop, Clarkson's car gradually went rotten over the three-day challenge, creating a horrible smell, and eventually it overheated due to maggots infesting the engine.
    • Hammond's car actually worked very well, even attracting some small animals... which either had to escape when the car forded a river, or were all seemingly killed after May accidentally tore it open with a JCB. Even after that, Hammond's car was easily the best of the three, right up until the exhaust set the bodywork on fire.
    • As for May: the mud car was impractically heavy and fell apart within moments; the brick car was even heavier (to the point the chassis broke in half), even less secure (the roof collapsed the instant he set off, and it completely fell apart as he drove through a river), and his industrial method of producing the bricks completely defeated the purpose of the challenge; and the straw/dung car also fell apart (twice), and had practically no windscreen so he couldn't see where he was going.
      Clarkson: It's the Meat-TI, the Tree-TI, and the Peat-TI!
  • In Season 1, Episode 9, "Berks to the Future", Clarkson tries to build a more 'sporty' SUV by mating the body of an old MG-B sports car to the internals of a Land Rover Discovery. The bodywork didn't fit properly and ended up floating ridiculously high above the wheels, the steering was barely functional, the brakes weren't functional at all, and neither were any of the dials on the dashboard. When he tried taking it offroad, it quickly started falling apart and he abandoned it. His second attempt, using the bodywork of a Mercedes SL, actually looked surprisingly good... from the outside. The interior was extremely shoddy and, like the MG B version, barely anything worked.
  • From the Namibia special:
    • Jeremy's Beach Buggy slowly became this over the course of the special. The trek through the desert that takes up the entire first half of the special thrashed Jeremy's buggy so hard that it barely worked by the time he got into town. The throttle was jammed open, there was a hole punched in the bonnet, the shock absorber exploded and punched another hole into his coolant tank, and by the end of the first episode could barely do a few miles before air got in and overheated the engine. The roads encountered in the second episode nearly shook it to death, mangling the headlights and (alongside some spiteful bodging from James) collapsed the front spoiler he had attached. He also lost both fan belts and many other small fragments from the engine.
    • That said, the others weren't in good condition either by the end of it; James' in particular had a leaking fuel tank and had caught fire due to a tool mishap near the end, turning the bonnet into a blackened scrapheap. Hammond's merely suffered many small foibles over the course of the episode (and got stuck on a cable winch at the very end, causing the three to fail the challenge they made the cars to accomplish), but it was still Jeremy's that was almost utterly wrecked by the finish line.
  • In Eurocrash, May's Crosley CC Convertible, by virtue of being 75 years old. It has a top speed of 40mph, makes an absolutely horrendous noise while doing so, is very cramped and uncomfortable, and shudders violently every time a truck passes due to its light weight, all of which makes it completely unsuitable for the lengthy motorway drives that make up most of the trip. On top of that, it breaks down on about half-a-dozen occasions. It's so bad that, for the first time in the trio's history, May actually gives up and decides to drive the forfeit car instead. Said backup car isn't much better, with May even proclaiming it to be the worst car he's ever driven, but he still finds it preferable to the Crosley.
  • In "Sand Job", the air conditioning in Hammond's Aston Martin DB9 Volante shuts off just fifteen minutes into the journey - not ideal when you're driving through the Sahara Desert - and the car itself overheats soon after. It continues to suffer from a litany of faults, mostly electrical, throughout the first half of the journey: it repeatedly gets stuck in gear, the dashboard intermittently shuts off, the overheating and gearbox issues force Hammond to crawl along at low revs and speed, and various other electronic systems deploy or shut down at random (including the deployable roll cage triggering on its own and smashing the rear window). Subverted once Hammond manages to limp to Nouakchott, where he's able to hook it up to a diagnostic laptop and finds that none of the car's systems are actually faulty; the ECU just thinks they're faulty and is shutting them down accordingly. Hammond tells the ECU to ignore the problems and, apart from its Sport mode failing to engage before the drag race, the DB9 behaves itself for the rest of the journey.
• Anachronic Order:
  • The audience segments for the first season, taped in various parts of the world, weren't used in the order that were taped. The opening scenes out in the desert and the audience segments that were part of the first episode were taped in Los Angeles in late September 2016. The audience segments in Johannesburg, South Africa for the second episode were actually the very first ones shot, in mid-July 2016.
    • The Audience segments of episodes 3 and 4 of Season 1 were then taped in Whitby, North Yorkshire, which was the next shoot after LA, so the order wound up only being only slightly tweaked, just flipping LA and Johannesburg so they could use the California location for the opening episode. The audience locations for each episode then progressed in the same order as they travelled, eventually ending in Dubai.
  • Richard Hammond's "single lap" round the desert sets in Episode 5 is clearly composed of multiple different attempts, as he starts out with visible damage on the left-hand side that wasn't there before, it suddenly disappears partway through the lap, and then at the end of the lap he slides sideways into a statue and accrues the damage that he had at the start of the run. It's a very jarring editing goof.
  • The stunt driving segment of Season 2, Episode 5, "Up, Down and Round the Farm", is exposed as this as well for comedic effect when Hammond notes that while the rev counter of the Subaru Clarkson is driving is shown at one point doing 6000 RPM, the speedometer next to it clearly says 0 MPH. It gets worse as the segment goes on.
  • It should be obvious, but the travel segments are also not used in order as the crew filmed, either, as some segments may take longer to edit together. To that point, they use Hammond's supercar crash to end the first episode of the second season. While the crew began filming for the season in October 2016, the crash occurred in June 2017, actually near the end of filming. To be fair, since the crash was quite dramatic and so was heavily reported in the car press, it was really a forgone conclusion they'd kick the season off with it.
• A Day in the Limelight: Abbie gets to step away from the Eboladrome to participate in Clarkson's review in Season 3 of the Lamborghini Urus by being his target in an overtaking challenge. She also gets to take a lap with Clarkson's motorized luggage in Season 3, Episode 12, "Legends and Luggage".
• All for Nothing:
  • The "From Sea To Unsalted Sea" episode ends like this. They drive across Georgia and Azerbaijan in order to eat bream. When they get there, Hammond realizes that a bream is a fish, and launches into his "I don't like fish!" spiel, which Clarkson takes as the cue to head back to the studio.
  • When the presenters reach their objective, the town Mörön, at the end of the Mongolia special, they make a beeline for the first pub they see, which is shuttered and closed.
  • Parodied in "A Massive Hunt". Throughout the special, Clarkon insists that the trip will be this, and that the pirate treasure they're looking for doesn't actually exist. Sure enough, after trekking across the east coast of Madagascar, sailing to a nearby island, trekking some more, and blowing up a beach, they don't find it... although they do find the Holy Grail.
  • At the end of Eurocrash, the trio make it to Maribor airport to find their plane back to England already taxiing down the runway. After an epic chase sequence to drive up the plane's open cargo ramp, the trio begin celebrating only for the plane to suddenly stop. They've just driven onto a plane that's just landed, and their plane is actually elsewhere.
  • The goal of "Sand Job" is for the presenters to drive from the northern border of Mauritania all the way south to Dakar, in homage to the Paris-Dakar Rally. They're mere miles away when Clarkson receives a frantic text from Mr. Wilman informing him of violent riots currently taking place there. Unable to set foot in Dakar, and with Senegal's other major airport closed, they're forced to drive all the way back to the Mauritanian capital to catch a flight home. ^note  In reality, Clarkson posted on Instagram they did in fact fly out of Dakar, backed by a police escort.
• Answer Cut: Jeremy's description of the Excellent is interrupted by James and Richard.
  Clarkson: [narrating] The internal organs of a Land Rover Discovery mated to the beautiful skin of a glamorous Mercedes SL... to create a vision of pure... What's the word?
  Hammond, May: Rubbish.
  Clarkson: It's not rubbish!
• Anvil on Head:
  • In the very cartoony "James May is Still Alive" promo, James narrowly misses being hit by an anvil on his way out of the workshop. He (and his car) are not so lucky later on with a dumpster, however James shrugs that off with a simple "Ow".
  • And again in the Conversation Street intro for "Up, Down and Round the Farm." This time Clarkson drops it directly on May's head. May remains unmoved and unfazed.
• Armor-Piercing Question: In the first episode of the second season, Clarkson and May are getting fed up with Hammond bringing them to the same Swiss town to look at museums until they figured out why:
  Clarkson: Do you keep bringing us to this town because it is the only one within a hundred miles of our wellness centre, where there is a fast charging point for your car?
  Hammond: [meekly] Yes. [[note]]Hammond's car in this episode is the Rimac Concept One, which is fully electric.
• Artistic License: During "Berks to the Future," May gets more people going through the revolving door he is using to charge up his cell phone by pulling the fire alarm. During fire alarms, revolving doors are locked off because of the possibility of them jamming from too many people trying to get through them at the same time in panic; alternate exits must be used instead.
• Artistic License – Geography: In the Mongolia Special, "Survival of the Fattest," the challenge is based on the premise that the nearest town, the city of Mörön, is several hundred miles to the northeast. As sparsely populated as western Mongolia is, it isn't completely empty, and there are numerous small towns and paved roads scattered through the country.
• Ask a Stupid Question...: In Season 1, Episode 3, "Opera, Art & Donuts", Hammond approaches Clarkson and May, who are watercolour-painting:
  Hammond: What are you two doing?
  Clarkson: [sarcastically] I'm defusing a bomb, Hammond. What does it look like?
• Ass Shove:
  • In Season 1, Episode 2, "Operation Desert Stumble," Clarkson gets stuck in a window trying to escape the terrorists. Clarkson then says the terrorists are (off-camera) doing "unpleasant" things to his back half, causing him to beg Hammond and May to shoot him.
  • In Season 2, Episode 1, "Past, Present or Future," Clarkson refuses to answer any questions about hill climbs in Switzerland because, thanks to being at Hammond's health retreat, he presently has a tube up his arse.
• A-Team Firing: In "Operation Desert Stumble", as Clarkson begs Hammond and May to kill him, May duly opens fire with his assault rifle, from no more than ten feet away, and manages to shoot all the way around the window frame without hitting Clarkson once. Clarkson is not amused.
  Jeremy: ...HOW DID YOU MISS?!
  James: [to Hammond] It's true what they say about machine guns, isn't it? You can't hit a thing with 'em!
• Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!!: In one of the show's early YouTube ads, a brain-storming session to come up with a name devolves into Hammond online colour-customizing a car, and Clarkson and May online customizing Ray-Ban sunglasses.
• Auto Erotica: Clarkson accidentally stumbles upon a couple "dogging" while looking for his car in a foggy parking lot in "Blasts From the Past." He beats an embarrassed and hasty retreat.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • In the same spirit as Top Gear's motto, "Ambitious, but rubbish," most of the show's creations fall under this category. Some that stand out are:
    • Hammond and May's upgraded version of Battleship that you can create at home! All you need is an unused air field, several thousand pounds worth of scrap cars, some shipping containers, two cranes, at least twenty explosive-rigged G-Wizes...
    • Hammond's tank-track-driven Ford Focus RS in "A Massive Hunt" looks badass, and half the time it's able to sail over terrain that Clarkson's Bentley and (especially) May's Caterham struggle with. Unfortunately, it spends the other half of the time breaking down, with the guide wheels particularly prone to falling off due to driving on hard tarmac, which they are not designed to do. Eventually, the front-right track broke completely, forcing Hammond to swap back to standard wheels, at which point the Focus became just plain impractical as it no longer had any ground clearance. This ultimately led to the destruction of the Focus's clutch after one particularly bad bump underneath.
    • The American "land yachts" driven by the trio in Lochdown already border on this, but definitely cross into this territory after being modified. Hammond equips his with an oversized spoiler and a giant supercharger sticking out of the bonnet... that completely blocks his view of the road in front of him. May converts his into a low-rider, but soon finds that it's too low, constantly scrapes along the ground, and eventually gets beached on the pontoon bridge. Clarkson, meanwhile, gives his car larger whitewall tyres (which scrape against the bodywork and make a horrendous noise every time he turns) and a nitrous system (which he didn't fit properly and therefore does nothing).
• Badass Driver:
  • Former NASCAR driver Mike Skinner had a Stig-type role in the first season of The Grand Tour, with his nickname being "The American". Unlike any of the Stigs (McCarthy, Collins, or Phil Keen), he didn't cover his entire body with his race suit and he also speaks, mainly grumbling about the quality of the car and making fun of the presenters.
    Skinner: [about the test track] ...wonder which one of them came up with this thing - the tall one, the short one, or the one with the girly hair?
  • Abbie Eaton, the driver for Season 2 onwards, is also impressive, but she keeps things short and is all business in her test laps.
  • Combined with Retired Badass, May's segment on the 50th anniversary of the Porsche 917 has retired racer Dickie Attwood go back behind the wheel of the very same 917 in which he won the 1970 24 Hours of Le Mans. In the ensuing race against a modern Porsche 911 GT2, driven by 2016 Le Mans winner Neel Jani, Dickie — at the age of 78 - put up an astonishing fight and even forced Jani off the track at one point. He also elected to drive the car not with a crash helmet but just wearing a flat cap.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • In Season 1, Episode 5, "Moroccan Roll", the celebrity guests, Dutch rock band Golden Earring, are introduced performing in a Rotterdam port beneath an overhanging shipping container. Given the segment's Black Comedy Running Gag, it's easy to assume that the shipping container is going to fall on them and crush them, but it doesn't. They're instead electrocuted when a loose cable falls into the sea.
  • During the release trailer for the "A Massive Hunt" special, Clarkson notes that they wanted to call it "Epic" instead... but "A Massive Epic" didn't sound right.
  • At the end of "A Scandi Flick", Clarkson and Hammond wait to see whether May was able to get his Mitsubishi Lancer Evo VIII running again, or whether he's been forced to take the Volvo. The Volvo arrives at the airport... but James isn't in it. Cue the damaged Mitsubishi arriving to the absolute astonishment of the other presenters.
    • Earlier in the same episode, the presenters took it in turns to drive through a tunnel as fast as they could, braking before reaching the wall at the end. After May crashes into the wall during his turn, nearly killing his Mitsubishi and cracking a rib, it Smash Cuts to Hammond lining up for his turn... and proceeding to coast through the tunnel at a leisurely pace, not even trying to beat Clarkson or May.
  • Early on in "Sand Job", Clarkson notes that Mr. Wilman has asked them to arrange for the fuel truck to be "accidentally" blown up, so that Amazon can put the resulting footage in the trailer. At multiple points, it looks like just such an accident is about to ensue - May burns his hands on the fuel pump and struggles to hold it, the truck is winched down a cliff using a cable that's audibly straining against its weight, it's driven into an active minefield - and yet on every occasion it survives unscathed. Just as you're starting to wonder whether it actually will explode, Clarkson's rogue snowmobile comes hurtling out of nowhere...
• Be Careful What You Wish For: At the start of "A Massive Hunt", May warns Clarkson and Hammond that the roads in Madagascar are among the worst in the world. Clarkson and Hammond go all-out to modify their cars for the horrendous roads they believe they're going to face, only to arrive in Madagascar and find the roads are seemingly fine. As they drive out of the city in which they started, both of them end up hoping that the roads actually do get worse, otherwise their modifications would have been a waste of time and effort. To say that the roads did get worse would be a massive understatement.
• Benevolent Boss:
  • In one of the brain-storming ads where the presenters are trying to come up with the name of the new series, Hammond gets an e-mail from "Jeff" pressuring them to hurry up and come up with one. "Jeff" is obviously Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.
  • Andy Wilman, the executive producer, gets far more lip-service than he did in their previous show. Clarkson always dourly refers to him as 'Mr. Wilman' whenever the presenters get a message from him to move forward with a challenge, or when he texts them to berate them.
• Bestiality Is Depraved: In the Colombia episode, Clarkson accidentally sees a man having carnal relations with a donkey. Discussions with local villagers reveal that they consider this to be normal, and a deeply offended Clarkson soon leads the troupe out of the village.
• Big "WHAT?!":
  • Hammond, when the obviously-supercharged Nissan Patrol he was racing in Dubai overtook his Porsche 918 Spyder.
  • Clarkson, when Hammond's Rimac overtakes his Aventador and May's NSX in their drag race within a few seconds.
• Black Comedy: The Celebrity Brain Crash segments of the first season. The premiere episode sets the segment up as a test of the celebrity guest's reflexes, but in reality, it's a set-up for them to be "killed" before they even reach the tent, often in a gruesome manner and right in front of the audience. The Narmy intro, James' meek "Does that mean they're not coming on, then?", and Richard's blunt description of what just happened only adds to the funny.
• Blatant Lies: After Hammond caused considerable damage to his Jaguar 420G after flooring it through a brutal off-road track, including a blown engine, everyone claims he managed to fix it, even though he clearly replaced it with a different car. Even Amazon X-Ray gets in on the joke.
  "Richard's Jaguar 420G now seems to have a 4.2-litre engine making 176 horsepower, a 0-60 time of 12.1 seconds, a top speed of 123 mph and a badge on the back that says XJ6"
• *Bleep*-dammit!:
  • In Season 1, Episode 12, "Censored to Censored", although they never actually say it aloud, thanks to being bleeped out and one Curse Cut Short, they still constantly show the name of their destination, Fucking, on maps and signs. It was likely a comical attempt to keep the show's rating down, but it didn't work — this is the first Grand Tour episode to get a TV-MA rating.
  • Hammond's uncensored Precision F-Strike after the clutch on his Focus RS breaks in "A Massive Hunt" is immediately followed by a censored one.
• Boring, but Practical: James defends his beach buggy from jabs by Richard and Jeremy in the Namibia Special with this.
  James: It's boring in that it WORKS.
  • Ultimately averted by the fact that it didn't work. James's buggy struggled with the dunes in the desert due to a lack of power while the lower ride meant that he was almost shaken to pieces on the rough roads in the north.
  • Invoked in "Chinese Food for Thought" as the trio are touring Chongqing. Clarkson comments that the city's aggressive and ongoing expansion programme provides a lot of different ways to make money, then explains that one man was smart enough to corner the market on doors. After all, every room in every one of those new buildings needs a door.
    Jeremy: Five million of them last year. Five million doors. "Well, that's not very interesting, is it?" "Yes, but I'm now the richest man in the world."
• Breaking the Fourth Wall:
  • In Season 1, Episode 9, "Berks to the Future," Hammond and May respond to Clarkson's voiceover, which they obviously can't hear during filming.
    Clarkson: [voiceover] We'd only gone a few miles before Richard and James completely changed their minds and realized that the Excellent was the best car they'd ever been in.
    Hammond: No, we haven't! Stop saying things in voiceover that aren't true!
  • They pull a similar gag in the first scene in Croatia in Season 2, Episode 4, "Unscripted", with Clarkson berating May and Hammond for saying lines that he's already recorded in post. Before the presenters depart, Clarkson then improvises the voiceover for the scene that then takes place immediately after.
• Break the Badass:
  • The Rimac crash had this sort of effect on Hammond, who has been noticeably more cautious ever since: having cheated death twice now, he doesn't want to risk a third crash (and neither does his wife, for that matter). Notably, in one episode, the trio are tasked with driving their cars round a bumpy, run-down, and ludicrously steep banked oval. Hammond flat-out refuses.
  • Lampshaded, but subverted, in the Colombia special. When Hammond refuses to drive down a steep (but not very high) bank, Clarkson accuses him of having "lost his bottle" since the Rimac crash. Hammond retorts that he's not scared of doing it, he just doesn't think he can get up the equally-steep bank on the other side. He's right.
  • After getting notified by Clarkson about May's crash in the tunnel in A Scandi Flick, Hammond decides to still do his tunnel run anyway... and drives normally at a brisk 28 mph.
• Brick Joke:
  • In the Mongolia episode, after the trio finishes building the car, Clarkson says they need to begin their journey by turning right, which he claims is good luck in Mongolia. At the end of the episode, they find a power line, a sign that they're close to returning to civilization. Once again, they decide to turn right, and sure enough, they find the town of Mörön.
  • In "Carnage a Trois", May is seen dismantling part of his car's boot in order to accommodate a dishwasher that otherwise wouldn't fit inside it. The same car is then used to drive up a Welsh hill, through dense forest that gradually dismantles his, Hammond's, and Clarkson's car. Once they all get to the top, Clarkson points out the dishwasher is still in May's boot and is probably wrecked after the lengthy drive... whereupon May realises that the boot release was on the door, which has broken off, so he can't get the dishwasher out anyway.
  • In "Eurocrash", when Clarkson pulls up after the opening ferry in his Mitsuoka Le-Seyde, Hammond refers to him and the car as "Cruella De Vil". Later, when May decides to pull another prank on both Clarkson and Hammond for their prior pranks on him and his Crosley CC Convertible, he re-upholstered the Le-Seyde's interior with faux-Dalmatian fur (which Clarkson found fitting).
  • In "Sand Job", Clarkson notes early on that Mr. Wilman wants them to destroy their fuel truck and Make It Look Like an Accident so they can put the resulting explosion in the trailer, and the presenters (noting the logistical problems that would ensue) agree not to do that. Sometime later, Clarkson attaches two snowmobiles to the front of his car to smooth the dirt road ahead of him, and one breaks loose and drives itself off into the distance. These two unrelated plot threads come crashing together (literally) when, 150 miles down the road, the trio are preparing for a drag race... only for the loose snowmobile to suddenly drive past them from out of nowhere and hit the fuel truck. Cue massive explosion.
  • In "One for the Road", May says he's planning on deleting Clarkson and Hammond's numbers from his phone once they're finished filming. At the end of the episode, he's shown doing exactly that.
• Bring My Brown Pants:
  • In the premiere episode, "The Holy Trinity", at the beginning of Clarkson and Hammond's duel between the McLaren P1 and the Porsche 918, they switch and drive a lap of each other's cars around the Portuguese race track. Clarkson comments on how the Porsche's four-wheel drive allows him to be more confident in taking corners faster. Hammond, driving the rear-wheel drive McLaren P1... doesn't.
    Hammond: I didn't think it was possible to shit yourself to death!
  • Once May arrives with the LaFerrari and they run their first drag race, Clarkson doesn't set the launch control properly, which causes his P1 to waver all over the track at the finish, which visibly shakes him.
  • Multiple instances during the Namibia special as they traverse the desert. At one point, Clarkson's buggy locks up, driving his buggy's front tyres deep into the sand, right in front of the edge of an outrageously steep dune that he didn't even see. Another harrowing scene (from the POV of Clarkson's buggy camera) shows Hammond's buggy going over another steep dune at an odd angle, which panics Clarkson, who radios the crew. As Jeremy rushes over to the edge, he finds Richard was able to get the buggy successfully down the dune.
    Clarkson: How the [bleep] did you get down that?
    Hammond: With my eyes shut! I was terrified!
  • Also in the Namibia special, as Jeremy launches his buggy from the cable car platform, he quickly realizes this. With his eyes closed.
    Clarkson: My rectum has just opened like a set of theatre curtains!
  • Clarkson, as he drives his Subaru (err, Audi) during the final scene of his rally car segment in Season 2.
  • During their "proving" that old Jags are reliable, Richard had a terrifying stop in the 0 to 100 to 0 challenge, and the following exchange occured:
    Jeremy: How much excrement?
    Richard: Well, brown seats would have been a better choice.
  • During the Colombia special, Hammond is doing a piece to camera while driving, when the car in front of him suddenly brakes. Hammond has to swerve and brake hard, and remarks afterwards that he may have just urinated.
• British Teeth: In one promo, Clarkson points out his and May's less than perfect teeth immediately mark them as British. When they get "Americanized", the makeup lady is seen applying Tipp-Ex to their mouths in one shot. And still, their replacement Eternally Pearly-White Teeth are even more terrifying than their original ones. Meanwhile, Hammond remains completely unchanged.
• Buffy Speak: While driving through Colombia in series three and looking for jaguars to photograph, Clarkson opines that you don’t want to come face to face with one as they have “very strong bitey bits”.
• Call-Back: To some segments or unfinished business from their time on Top Gear:
  • Alluding to a notorious segment from Series 15 of Top Gear, when the three presenters and Wilman founded their new production company, W. Chump & Sons, all four bought Reliant Robins as 'company cars.' ^note In January, 2016, Clarkson came clean and admitted the differential of the car had been modified to get it to roll. The presenters are actually fans of the Robin, which is why they bought them.
    • They are seen in the first Amazon 'name brain-storming' YouTube ad. May's is beige, Hammond's is brown, and Clarkson's is blue.
    • In the second ad, the fourth car (the green one that belongs to Andy Wilman) is shown tipped over on its side.
    • Paparazzi later caught them in North London driving them around, and speculation began if they were using them for a segment of the show. Clarkson then refuted this on Twitter, saying they are really just company cars — so they were likely just driving them around to generate publicity for (at the time, the still unaired) show.
  • The show's first shoot, in Portugal, was of a shootout between a Ferrari LaFerrari, a McLaren P1, and Porsche 918 Spyder, a 'dream race' the presenters had first tried to set up during Series 21 of Top Gear. (Hammond had made a bet with Clarkson that if the P1 lost, that Clarkson would legally change his name to "Jennifer"). The shoot-out never came to pass due to varying cop-outs (err, concerns) from the automobile manufacturers. ^note  each car maker at varying points backed out of the race, citing road conditions, or mechanics, or any reason they saw that could give an edge to a different competitor's car. . Clarkson did know someone who owned all three who could've lent them to Top Gear, the problem was their last name - Bin Laden. ^note  While the infamous Osama was actually something of a black sheep of the prominent Saudi Binladin [sic] family, the optics gave the BBC pause.
    • While the presenters don't elaborate on how the cars were procured for the shootout, we do find out the Ferrari May is given to use is straight from the company and is actually unlicensed — the number plates are fake — which is a disadvantage the other two presenters exploit when they suggest going out and testing the cars away from the track.
    • Also, while a Ferrari 488 GTB was used to introduce and demonstrate the characteristics of the show's new test track, the "Eboladrome", Ferrari would not allow the American to put the 488 through a timed lap on the Eboladrome to compare against other cars.
    • May continues his running gag that he started during Series 20 of Top Gear of calling the LaFerrari the 'Ferrari The Ferrari' (literally translating the name from Italian) and actually never refers to it as the LaFerrari over the course of the shootout segment. Clarkson gets in on the act in an episode of Season 2.
  • When brain-storming for show names, Clarkson suggests "Selling England By The Pound", "Watcher Of The Skies", "Supper's Ready", and "Fifth Of Firth", irking Hammond and May as they are all just names of classic-era Genesis songs.
  • When Jeremy asks how many cars the three have crashed, Richard launched into a Long List that ended with a rocket-powered dragster, which is the one Top Gear accident that the three hosts will barely reference.
  • While much hay was made in the press as to how much The Grand Tour may not be allowed to be as similar in feel to Top Gear (detailed in-part in this interview with producer Andy Wilman) the tagline in the first teaser is the often-used Top Gear quip, "...what could possibly go wrong?''.
    • In the end, the show's structure is very similar to Top Gear with a news segment ("Conversation Street") and a celebrity segment ("Celebrity Brain Crash / Face-Off") serving as act breaks to the main segment, although Celebrity Brain Crash was decidedly not an interview than it was for an excuse for a bit of black comedy.
    • Also to that point, 13 episodes were shot for Season 1, but only 11 were taped in front of an audience ^note Two shows were taped in Whitby (their first time in front of a British audience since they'd left Top Gear) and two were taped at Loch Ness, Scotland, as a two-parter released December 30th and 31st of 2016 was filmed in Namibia, with a set-up similar to the periodic road-trip 'Special' episodes of Top Gear — there is no audience present, none of the normal segments, or any credit sequence couch gags. Season 2's closing episode is another special, this time filmed in Mozambique.
    • Season 3's 'Special' two-parter takes place in Columbia, in South America, and as with the announcement that the fourth season will dispense with the tent, banter, celebrities, & audience completely, it seems likely that season will be comprised of episode-long pieces each from a single location.
    • For the second & third seasons, the audience segments were taped at a single location in England (actually not far from Clarkson's 2nd home), and tickets were solicited over the web by a crowd service, Applausestore, rather than by Amazon, just like the way Top Gear (and many British panel shows, like QI) are filmed.
    • Each episode ends "... and on that terrible disappointment", instead of "... and on that bombshell."
  • In Season 1, Episode 10, Clarkson references Top Gear's theme song; the full exchange is described under Take That! below.
  • In Season 2, Episode 7, Hammond during his review of the Lamborghini Huracan Performante alludes to a disappointing review of the previous Huracan "a lifetime ago, on a car show in a galaxy, far, far away."
  • In Season 2, Episode 8, Clarkson alludes to when he and Hammond were pulled over and lost their driving licenses by the French police in "The Perfect Road Trip" special and they egg James on in an attempt to get the same thing to happen to him on the same stretch of road.
  • In Season 2, Episode 10, Clarkson prefaces a review of the Tesla Model X SUV with a recap of the pair of libel lawsuits Tesla filed against Top Gear after his unfavourable review of the Tesla Roadster back in 2008. During the review, when he begins to talk about some of the drawbacks of the car, Amazon insists on loading the SUV up with lawyers, who begin scold him accordingly. ^note In the review, Clarkson is actually genuinely impressed with the SUV, although he points out a big drawback at the end (once he uses its automation features to park the SUV in a tight parking space & trap the lawyers inside) — its $215K price tag.
  • Towards the end of "A Massive Hunt", having arrived at the beach where they believe the pirate treasure to be, Hammond tests his metal detector by holding it up to his "hill climb knee", a reminder of the injuries he sustained in his Rimac crash.
  • In "Sand Job", the presenters find a tunnel that will take them through the cliff face in front of them, instead of having to try and find a way up it. When Clarkson suggests they try and race through it as fast as possible, May point-blank refuses, on account of having been injured in a similar race in "A Scandi Flick".
    • The "Cue the music" Hard-Work Montage returns here, and once again, The A-Team theme tune plays. This was repeated for the trio's Grand Finale "One for the Road".
  • During "One for the Road", they drive across Zimbabwe to reach the border post in Botswana, where their task for the episode is finished. However, earlier in the trip, the trio had decided they were going to push into Botswana and end the show at Kubu Island, where they ended their first special seventeen years prior. There is an unexpected callback to that episode once they are in Botswana, as Clarkson and May discover in a camping compound the original cars they drove with through the country all those years prior (namely James' Mercedes and Jeremy's Lancia, as Hammond had long since taken Oliver the Opel Kadett back to the UK).
    • Clarkson is visibly moved, as he took a headlight from the Lancia at the end of the special, and subsequently packed it as a good luck charm on every long-form special since. He gets his pack from the production vehicle, retrieves the headlight, and lines it back up into the car.
• Camera Abuse: Every episode in Season 1 has an intro that ends with an overhead drone shot of the area, which then gets knocked out of the sky by some local hazard, such as plowing into a seagull in Whitby or getting blasted out of the sky in California.
• Captain Crash:
  • Richard Hammond continues his tradition established in Top Gear with wrecking two supercars in Season 2. How many had he driven that season? Two.^note The second car was wrecked not by a crash, but by Hammond accidentally pouring water into the gasoline tank.
  • Even retroactive recognition in Season 1 during their second episode in Whitby as Richard lists off his crashes in Yorkshire alone:
  Richard: My first car, and my second car, my mum's car, my dad's car, my third and fourth cars, my first four motorcycles, the Radio York radio van, the Radio Leeds radio car, and the jet-powered dragster.^note The last one was between series 8 and series 9 of Top Gear.
• Cassandra Truth: Double-subverted in "A Massive Hunt", with regards to May's second-hand claim that the roads in Madagascar are the worst in the world. Clarkson and Hammond actually do believe him and make radical upgrades to their cars in preparation... then when they get to Madagascar and see the roads by the port are perfectly fine, they immediately stop believing him, assuming that the roads elsewhere on the island must be just as good (they aren't) and May's friend must have been exaggerating (she wasn't).
• Casual Danger Dialogue: In "Operation Desert Stumble", as the trio is driving the Queen of England to safety while taking heavy fire from the terrorists, Clarkson and May take the time to calmly discuss the getaway car.
  Hammond: Will you stop reviewing the car?!
• Censored for Comedy:
  • During the Conversation Street for S2:E6, Clarkson brings up a Chinese brake pad company called "Dickass."
    James: What were you looking for when you came across...?
    [Audience erupts in laughter]
    Hammond: What had you put in? Had you been through all 27,000 pages to get to that one?
    Clarkson: I was just looking at pictures of funny cats.
  • A two-for-one example during "Carnage a Trois", as May overtakes one of The Grand Tour production staff during the hot hatch race. Not only is the staffer's ensuing rant almost entirely bleeped out, but the subtitles hilariously Bowdlerize it as "You son of a female dog! Go away in a reproductive manner!"
• Censored Title: Literally with Season 1, Episode 11's title, "[censored] to [censored]", which is a road trip from Wank, Germany to Fucking, Austria.^note The latter has since been renamed.
• Chekhov's Armory: Parodied in "Sand Job". While we're never shown what's inside the backup van, apart from the winch cable Clarkson uses to get down the cliff, we're told that it contains "everything the presenters could need". This apparently includes a pair of snowmobiles - for a trip to the Sahara Desert. Clarkson lampshades why Mr. Wilman would have brought those in the first place, but they're exactly what he needs to sand down Mauritania's washboard roads.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • At the beginning of "Carnage a Trois", Clarkson shows off a gigantic trebuchet that he and the other presenters supposedly built to occupy themselves during the COVID lockdown. He lampshades the trope by admitting that they haven't thought of a use for it yet, but something will come up eventually. At the end of the special, the trio discuss their mutual hatred of the Citroën C3 Pluriel and express a desire to send it back where it came from. If only they had a way to launch it across the 25-mile-wide English Channel...
    Clarkson: ...wait a minute!
  • During Clarkson and Hammond's race on the frozen lake in "A Scandi Flick", Clarkson shows off a system that causes flames to shoot out of his exhaust, dissuading Hammond from overtaking him. Later, as he drives down the ski slope with his shed in tow, he apparently activates the system by mistake and sets the shed ablaze, destroying it.
    Hammond: Your shed's on fire.
    Clarkson: How've I done that?!
  • "Sand Job" contains multiple:
    • It's noted early on that Mr. Wilman wants the trio's fuel truck to get blown up so he can use the footage in the trailer. If you've seen the trailer, you'll know he eventually gets his wish.
    • At one point, Clarkson straps a pair of snowmobiles to the front of his Jag so that their tracks will sand down the road in front of him, making it smoother. It actually works, until one of them detaches itself and rides off into the distance. Some time later, and 150 miles away, Clarkson and May are planning a drag race when the loose snowmobile suddenly comes hurtling into view, heading straight towards the fuel truck...
    • Right at the beginning, while they wait for the train with their cars on it, Clarkson points out the sheer number of empty plastic bottles littering the tracks. Towards the end of the episode, the pair find a 400-meter-wide river separating them from Senegal, and wonder how on earth they're going to get their cars across. Hammond suggests that they build rafts out of all the discarded plastic bottles around them and float across - and it works.
• China Takes Over the World: At the end of the Lochdown special, they arrive at a American-style sports bar only to find all the products and memorabilia had been replaced by Chinese ones.
• Cluster Bleep-Bomb: At one point in "Carnage a Trois", a Grand Tour staff member of French descent is called in to participate in a hot hatch race. She spends the whole race swearing like a sailor and at one point lets loose a barrage of bleeped curses that goes on for about ten seconds.
• Cluster F-Bomb: While the previous episodes had contained a couple of choice swear words, the Namibia special has the presenters throwing around the word "shit" like it's going out of style. Given the difficulty curve of the journey, including a few close calls with cliffs, it's not surprising.
• Comically Missing the Point: After introducing any Celebrity Brain Crash guest who promptly dies through some unforeseen accident:
  May: Does that mean he's not coming on then?
  • During "Operation Desert Stumble," after James reads that one of the presenters being killed will force the whole mission to restart:
    Clarkson: It's like that Tom Cruise movie...
    [beat]
    Hammond: Cocktail? ^note The film Jeremy is referencing is obviously this one.
  • In the Mozambique special, after forgetting what Dragons' Den is called, Hammond refers to it as "the one with Alan Sugar", and is "corrected" by a subtitle that reads "he means Donald Trump". Alan Sugar presents the UK version of The Apprentice, and Trump presented the US version; neither has ever presented Dragon's Den.
• Cool Boat:
  • The enormous Team Concise racing trimaran that Jeremy is unable to outrun on his personal watercraft in "Dumb Fight at the O.K. Corral".
  • Clarkson's boat in the Seaman special filmed in Vietnam is a replica of a Vietnam-war era American patrol boat, or PBR. As no PBR (which were originally built by yacht-maker Hatteras) were recovered from the war, Clarkson's is a replica created by Australian designers, at a cost of (which Clarkson admits meekly to the other two presenters, who each bought second-hand boats) over £100,000.
• Cool Car: Obviously.
  • The premiere episode alone features the McLaren P1, the Porsche 918, and the Ferrari LaFerrari, plus the Ferrari 488 appears to demonstrate the Eboladrome. Not to mention the veritable army of cool cars that shows up in that intro.
  • The Aston-Martin Vulcan Jeremy drives in the test segment of "Operation Desert Stumble", which he stalls initially taking it to the track.
  • In "Moroccan Roll", Clarkson drives an Alfa Romeo 4C Spider around (natch) Morocco. He dissects its flaws (including giving him a leg cramp), but then, later devotes an entire segment to a film of just a long set of beauty passes of the car, in moody black and white, set to Dusty Springfield's version of "Windmills Of Your Mind", from The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) — explaining the car is at its best when seen and not necessarily driven.
  • In a segment during Season 1, Episode 6, "Happy Finnish Christmas", Hammond drives the first right-hand drive Ford Mustang to arrive in the UK. He's so excited, he brings a small band with him to the dock and drives it himself right out of the shipping container.
  • Clarkson goes wide-eyed over another Alfa Romeo during "Dumb Fight at the OK Coral", this time the Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio, with more Car Porn as he drives it around Wales. While he again needles the car, this time for its cramped front cabin and Alfa's instance that they developed its very-Ferrari-like engine themselves, he eventually glows over the car, and then even decides to head to a dealership and go buy one... until he sees a hot red 4C. ^note Car & Driver magazine agrees.
  • The second season premiere starts out with the boys driving a Lamborghini Aventador S, a Honda NSX^note badged as an Acura in the US, and a electric super car built in Croatia called the Rimac Concept One. The Rimac embarrasses the Lamborghini and the Honda in a drag race, however, Richard Hammond has some trouble with it later on.
  • The Bugatti Chiron that Clarkson drives in Season 2, Episode 3, "Bah Humbug-atti".
  • The McLaren 720S Hammond drives around the Eboladrome in Season 2, Episode 4, "Unscripted".
  • The McLaren Senna that Clarkson drives in the opening episode of Season 3, "Motown Funk".
  • Eurocrash has three, all from Slovakia. First, there's Skoda's planned 1957 Le Mans entry, an extremely lightweight yet powerful sports car that's also utterly gorgeous. Then, there's the Praga Bohema, a modern Czech sports car that weight less than a tonne yet produces 700 bhp. To top it all off, there's the Klein Vision AirCar, an honest-to-goodness Flying Car. The presenters are impressed by the first two but the third leaves them utterly speechless.
• Couch Gag:
  • For the majority of the Season 1 episodes, the opening montage includes a shot of a sign, either a greeter at the airport, or a sign outside a shop, welcoming the presenters to the town or city where they are filming the audience segment in, and the third name is always comically misspelled.
  • In all the first season episodes, the opening montage ends with a drone taking aerial shots of the Grand Tour's tent, which is then always comically knocked out of the sky: in California, it's shot down; In Johannesburg, it's brought down by a curious giraffe: In Whitby, it both falls into a lobster's cage and is pooped on by a seagull; In Dubai, it is knocked down by a fancy water fountain (and crashes into the same fountain to add insult to injury).
  • The X-Ray Trivia at the beginning of each episode always begin by identifying the hosts as "Writer, broadcaster, [gag appropriate to theme of episode]". For example, "The Beach (Buggy) Boys, Part 2" opens by referencing three songs by The Beach Boys:
    Jeremy Clarkson: Writer, broadcaster, good vibrations.
    Richard Hammond: Writer, broadcaster, fun, fun, fun.
    James May: Writer, broadcaster, God only knows.
• Could Say It, But...:
  • During the Colombia special, the presenters go to great pains to avoid mentioning the country's notorious cocaine trade even once, discussing empty freighters, "forest products" and lavish mansions owned by men of indeterminate occupation. James blows it mere moments from the end.
  • When the subject of poaching rhinos and elephants comes up in Namibia, they again awkwardly tiptoe around apportioning blame by saying that a "certain region" is the source of the problem for believing that powdered tusk and horn is a panacea of sorts. Anyone with even cursory knowledge of Africa's ongoing poaching problems knows they're talking about China. To avoid losing business there, though, they have to pretend it's vague.
• Credits Gag:
  • At the end of the reef-making episode, "Dumb Fight at the O.K. Coral", a disclaimer states: "All procedures and policies were followed and no damage was done to the reef or wildlife during filming. Jeremy got a sunburnt neck but he was very brave and hardly mentioned it at all."
  • In Eurocrash, the trio are amused and baffled to find a waxwork of Nigel Mansell in a Krakow waxwork museum, and decide to steal it and take it with them, with Clarkson and Hammond providing dialogue for Mansell throughout the episode. At the end, Mansell is listed as a presenter alongside the main trio.
• Critical Annoyance: At one point in "Sand Job", Hammond's Aston Martin starts beeping to alert him to... something. Hammond assumes that the roof hasn't been lowered properly, but his efforts to force it shut do nothing to stop the beeping, and he's forced to live with it for quite some time before it finally shuts off.
• Curse Cut Short: Well, kind of. When James introduces the second half of the film in "Censored To Censored", he gets cut off before he can finish the name of the town they left off in: Fucking, Austria.
• Deadpan Snarker:
  • During "Moroccan Roll," after Jeremy's plan to find out the weight of the cars ends in spectacular failure:
    Clarkson: James, it's not acceptable in Morocco to kill animals to establish the weight of a car, so...
    May: It's not acceptable in Morocco?
  • While debating the merits of the Bentley in "[censored] to [censored]":
    Clarkson: James, when I first met you, I thought you were ugly. And now, I still think you're ugly.
    May: A crushing criticism from one so handsome.
  • This gem in "A Scandi Flick", as Hammond and May are shopping for supplies:
    Hammond: [trying to read the label on an axe] I haven't brought my glasses.
    [May takes the axe and examines it for a moment]
    May: ...it's an axe.
• Death by Cameo: Pretty much the entire point of Celebrity Brain Crash. According to this article in The Sun, the BBC cautioned the show from doing 'Top Gear-style celebrity interviews', although in the same article the Beeb denies it. Regardless, it's likely both a jab at the BBC and the idea of the celebrity segment in-general, which for many fans was the least-liked segment of Top Gear.
  • Subverted in that some of the guests (Charlize Theron, Kimi Räikkönen, and Nena) were filmed at a distance and were likely just a crew member or stunt person playing the actual person suggested. (Another clue: the celebrity (and to a lesser extent the person in charge of booking celebrities) also isn't listed in the end credits.)
• Death by Irony: In "Berks To The Future" the Celebrity Brain Crash guest, Nena, is "killed" by being carried into the air... by 99 red balloons.
• Death Course:
  • Clarkson sets up the test track, the Eboladrome, as this, as wildlife could dart out whilst driving, one corner hugs an electrical substation, while the turn near the finish is near a pen of grazing sheep. A tight turn is meant to be drifted through rather than driven. The name comes from the fact that the layout of the track resembles the Ebola virus.
  • After the course was laid out, and the first test laps began, according to Clarkson, a unexploded WWII munition was found, and so the track had to be re-tooled to flow around it.
  • The presenters have to go through a more literal one in Amman, Jordan in "Operation Desert Stumble," used to allow special forces to train and compete.
  • The Detroit racetrack qualified, according to Jeremy. Hammond set up a course inside an abandoned factory with one turn so tight, their sports cars were in real danger of running through the walls if they drove too fast. Then a barrel of palm oil was poured onto the track while Jeremy was making his lap...
• Defeating the Undefeatable:
  • Discussed in the Namibia special, "The Beach Buggy Boys", after Clarkson and Hammond come across the wheel-less carcass of a dead Toyota Hilux in a small village. Clarkson is astonished, noting that Namibia is so harsh it's managed to "kill the unkillable car" — a Call-Back to a couple of early episodes of Top Gear when the presenters punished a Hilux mercilessly and it miraculously still worked.
  • In the Madagascar special, the roads proved to be so unforgiving that they managed to do something that no other place on Earth had ever done before: irreparably break one of the trio's cars.
• Delayed Explosion: Hammond's supercar crash caused a short circuit in the linked electrical cells, which caused them to burst in sequence, a problem called thermal runaway, which, according to May, caused the wreck to continue to catch fire even five days after the accident.
• Determinator:
  • Both Hammond and his cheap motorbike in the Mozambique special. Hammond keeps going despite falling off his bike countless times and sustaining minor injuries, while the bike itself survives numerous falls, stalls, and trips through mud and water.
  • Similarly, May's Caterham in "A Massive Hunt". As May repeatedly states, it's a track car that's designed for smooth tarmac, not the horrific dirt roads of Madagascar, even with the larger wheels May equipped it with. Its open cockpit also means he spends the whole journey being showered with dirt and mud, and by the finish line there isn't an inch of it that's clean. Yet the Caterham just keeps going, without any mechanical problems and without getting stuck once.
  • May's Mitsubishi Lancer Evo VIII in "A Scandi Flick" survives not one, but two mishaps that should by all rights have totalled it. First, May slides it sideways into a wall, wrecking the entire front-right portion of the car (and breaking one of his ribs in the process), yet he manages to get it repaired with some help and is able to continue. Then, towards the end, the car plunges through the surface of a frozen lake and the engine bay is submerged for several minutes while Clarkson and Hammond launch a rescue attempt. Both are convinced that the Evo is dead, and are absolutely astounded to see May drive up in it at the end, albeit with a significant amount of missing bodywork.
• Dick Dastardly Stops to Cheat: In the early stages of the race in "The Falls Guys", Clarkson calls the airline that May and Hammond will be taking from New York City to Buffalo and downgrades their tickets from business-class seats at the front of the plane to economy seats at the back, complicating boarding for the injured Hammond. (A bit later, Clarkson calls the airline back and arranges for Hammond and May to be denied alcohol on the flight, but that's less cheating and more Clarkson being Clarkson.)
• Didn't Think This Through: In "International Buffoons Vacation," Clarkson builds an RV which is shaped like a boat. This includes a seat on the roof, like a nautical bridge, where he intends to drive. May and Hammond quickly point out that all of the surfaces get incredibly hot under the Nevada sun.
• Different in Every Episode: The introduction clip to "Conversation Street"; a couple of times it's played straight, but more often than not, there's something there that shouldn't be...
• Disproportionate Retribution:
  • During "Operation Desert Stumble", things are going well until May shoots and kills Hammond aboard the airplane. As they make their way back, Clarkson asks why, to which May replies with, "He was being annoying." On the next run through, Hammond shoots and kills May at the same point in the run. Why? "Well, he shot me!"
  • When the team finds there are no hotels in Detroit, Hammond opts to just buy a house in the city for $2,200. James decides to plant a vegetable garden in the front lawn (in keeping with Detroit's urban farming start-ups). Jeremy drives his Mustang RTR Spec 3 right through the plants while James is farming.
    • James gets his revenge by dumping a full barrel of vegetable oil in the Cadillac factory race while Jeremy is making his lap. The Mustang spins out and nearly crashes.
• Distracted by the Sexy: In Croatia, Clarkson and Hammond can't find a crew member to start a drag race for them, so they find a very attractive Croatian model to do it instead. But they are so distracted that when she starts the race, neither car moves.
• Dude, Not Funny!: While discussing the ban on motorsports in Switzerland, Clarkson makes an 9/11 analogy which the audience and Hammond found is taking it too far.
• Eagle Land: American audiences are portrayed as friendly and good-natured until they have a difference of opinion against the British hosts, for example, which sport better fits the term "football." This inevitably leads to shouting, fighting, and eventually the presenters cowering somewhere while the audience chants "USA! USA!"
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • In the first season, the tent moved from location to location. The second season does not for a number of reasons — costs, difficulty to get celebrities for segments, and a series of unfortunate events that rendered both Hammond and Clarkson in less-than-ideal health.
  • Speaking of celebrities, the first season had Celebrity Brain Crash, a segment that which was essentially a Take That! at the BBC lawyers, for threatening the show if it had too similar a format to Top Gear. It was then replaced with "Celebrity Face Off" in the second season after everyone agreed it was rubbish. In the third season, the running gag has been that there has been an audience segment planned (usually with some D-list celeb) but now needs to be bumped for time.
  • The American, the test driver for the first season, was unpopular enough that the man who played him, Mike Skinner, agreed to leave the series.
• Epic Fail: In Eurocrash, seeing how miserable May has become from having to drive the Crosley, Clarkson and Hammond decide to cheer him up by organising a drag race against four slow vehicles that they're sure even the Crosley can out-drag, the last of which is just a man on a bicycle. May still comes last. Yes, even the cyclist was faster than it. Needless to say, this only makes May's mood worse.
• Escalating War:
  • During the segment on Hammond's bugout vehicle in "Berks To The Future", he brags about how it is bulletproof. However, Clarkson and May quickly demonstrate that it is only against low-caliber guns — and less effective against automatic, sniper, and finally, rocket launcher fire. With that vehicle demolished, Hammond makes his next vehicle to stand up better — however, his co-presenters then bring a tank and blow that one sky high as well. Hammond's final vehicle he declares is nigh-indestructible against any kind of artillery. Unfortunately for him, someone let Clarkson and May aboard the HMS Richmond and then gave them access to its 4.5-inch Mark 8 naval gun...
  • In "A Scandi Flick", Clarkson pranks Hammond by painting out the "I" on his Martini Racing livery. When Hammond doesn't notice, Clarkson freezes his car keys in ice instead. Hammond retaliates by freezing the whole of Clarkson's car. Clarkson ruining Hammond's pizza seems like very petty vengeance, but his real vengeance comes the following day, when he shoves Hammond's hut down a ski slope with Hammond still inside it.
• Eskimos Aren't Real: Hammond spends quite some time at the beginning of "Sand Job" insisting that Mauritania isn't a real country and is instead from a C. S. Lewis novel. He continues to assert this even once they're in Mauritania.
• Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: Clarkson spends the early portion of "A Scandi Flick" noting that, while the Arctic Circle is supposedly "the last great wilderness", it doesn't really look like it. Later, once the road disappears, Clarkson remarks that it finally looks like a wilderness: "There's no roads, there's no villages, there's no... hotels..." It then dawns on the trio that they may not be able to find any shelter for the night.
• Failed a Spot Check: Early on in "A Scandi Flick", Clarkson blanks out the "I" on Hammond's Martini Racing livery to make it read "Martin Racing". Hammond doesn't notice until Clarkson - lampshading how he's been "not very observant" - points it out to him, and even then it takes him several seconds to realise what the problem is.
• The Fellowship Has Ended: "One for the Road", which marks the end of the partnership between Clarkson, Hammond, and May, ends with Clarkson unplugging his lav mic, the trio shaking hands, the crew celebrating the end of the series, and the trio driving across the Makgadikgadi Pan heading away from Kubu Island, waving goodbye to each other before they drive off in separate directions. And May, as he said he was going to do earlier in the trip, looks to delete Clarkson and Hammond's contacts from his phone as he's driving.
• Fix It in Post: As with Top Gear, this is parodied and subverted.
  • In the first episode, after Clarkson claims the Royal Air Force is the best air force in the world, the American crowd starts booing and making patriotic remarks. Clarkson retorts that it doesn't matter what they say, because it'll just get edited out. This is followed by a Gilligan Cut rapid-fire montage of the presenters getting roughed up by the audience while continuing to insist that the RAF is the best, then a brief shot of a make-up artist hiding their injuries, before they continue as though nothing had happened.
    • The same thing with the audience in Nashville during "Dumb Fight at the O.K. Coral", when the hosts start arguing with another American-based crowd about which sport deserves the right to be called "football".
  • Clarkson's review of the Aston Martin Vulcan in "Operation Desert Stumble" starts with him struggling to get in, taking several attempts, before stalling the car almost immediately. He remarks that they'll just edit all that out. They didn't.
  • The entire end segment of Season 2, Episode 5, "Up, Down And Round The Farm", which begins with a very impressive stunt driving film, very much in the style of stunt driver Ken Block, including using the car to herd and lock up a pen of sheep, with Clarkson at the wheel. However, before Clarkson can end the episode, Hammond and May show several behind-the-scenes clips of the filming, which show that Clarkson's driving was not as amazing as it seems. ^note As well as exposing that the driver for the majority of the segment was actually British rally car driver Mark Higgins.
• Foregone Conclusion: Thanks to widespread reporting of the incident, Hammond's crash (shown in the Series 2 premiere) in the Rimac Concept One that hospitalized him is treated as such, complete with Clarkson snarking "We all know how that turned out", as Hammond talks about the car for the first time on the show.
• Foreign Queasine: Hammond remains an unadventurous eater, which Clarkson and May are happy to exploit for laughs. At one point during their visit to China, Clarkson and May try goose intestines quick-fried with hot chilis, which Clarkson describes as having the taste and texture of "rubber hosepipe coated in napalm". Hammond counters that he's seen more appetizing things stuck to his terrier's backside. During an overnight stop in "Seamen", Clarkson orders up an assortment of fried insects and spiders. When Hammond refuses to touch any of them, Clarkson offers him some hard-boiled eggs, which turn out to be balut.^note Balut is a popular street food in Southeast Asia and the Philippines; duck eggs are fertilized and allowed to incubate until the fetus is almost fully developed, then boiled and eaten whole out of the shell. Even Clarkson admits that's a bit beyond what he can tolerate.
  • Also played with when Hammond decides to make deep-fried spaghetti bolognese for Clarkson's birthday dinner in one episode, claiming that it's a Scottish culinary tradition to fry anything and everything possible. The others are less than pleased with the results.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: In "Operation Desert Stumble", during the part where the Audi driven by May, Clarkson and Hammond is being chased by terrorists through a town, if you quickly pause the episode at the right moment, you can see one of the 'terrorists' wearing a shirt with "Mission X" and a website written on it. For context, Mission X is actually a company run by ex-special forces commandos that specializes in movie and TV documentary consulting and organisational training, as well as in extreme combat-realistic scenarios, war games, and survival situations and adventures like the presenters are running through.
• Funny Background Event:
  • After Daniel Ricciardo is reduced to a fine red spray across the window of the tent during the Season 1 finale's Celebrity Brain Crash segment, Clarkson and Hammond hastily introduce a new film while May wanders off to go clean it. Come back after the film, and while Clarkson and Hammond discuss that film and introduce the next one, May is actually outside the tent cleaning off the window, and doing a surprisingly thorough job.
  • In [censored] to [censored], after spending much of the episode debating the existence of the Loch Ness Monster (which might or might not have killed Tim Burton in his submarine), during the closing segment, a mysterious object can be seen rising out of the loch through the window.
  • The multitude of looks and people getting out of the way of Hammond as he drives around Dubai as well as through a wall and then around the Dubai Mall in the Ripsaw EV 2, basically a 700-horsepower civilian-grade tank, during the opening segment of "Up, Down And Round The Farm".
  • During Season 3, Episode 8, "International Buffoons Vacation" as the presenters trek in camper vans though the southwestern US, there is a Running Gag through the episode of Clarkson seeing in the distance apparitions that look like The American, the test driver replaced after the first season.
• Fun with Acronyms:
  • The name of the track that appears in "It's a Gas Gas Gas" is the Grand Tour Special High Intensity Test Track, or GTSHITT. ^note Really Bruntingthorpe Proving Ground, if you must know.
  • Likewise, in "Breaking, Badly," the Grand Tour Institute of Technology, or GTIT.
  • One Series 3 episode has them come up with a truncated version of the NC500 ^note North Coast 500 through Scotland, based on a route suggested by Hammond. May suggests a name that Clarkson promptly vetoes because it abbreviates to "SHIT". Hammond then suggests a name that the other two agree to... that abbreviates to "PENIS". Leads to a truly hilarious moment in which Clarkson compliments Hammond on the length and beauty of his PENIS.
  • Season 2, episode 7 features the Motorway Inter Lane Fuelling, or the MILF.
• Fun with Subtitles:
  • When Jerome D'Ambrosio (the French-speaking Belgian F1 driver the presenters enlist to make the timed laps during the 'Holy Trinity' hypercar shootout) finishes his test laps and comes back to talk to them about the feel of the cars, the English subtitles have him slagging both the Ferrari and the Porsche yet showering praise on the P1, until Hammond and May realizes that Clarkson is writing them.
  • Clarkson does it again in "Berks To The Future", pretending the footballers looking at his custom car ("The Excellent") are complimenting it heavily, when it's obvious they all dislike it. Parodied when one of them is speaking English, but is still subtitled as having praised the car.
• Gaslighting: Played for laughs in "Survival of the Fattest". Clarkson and May have a secret agreement that Hammond cannot be allowed to drive John the kit car due to his crash-prone nature. When Hammond starts asking whether he can have a turn at the wheel, they start telling him that he's already driven John and claiming that his memory must be going, since he can't remember it. Hammond gets increasingly upset as this goes on.
• Gearhead Show: It's the invokedSpiritual Successor of Clarkson, Hammond, and May's run on Top Gear.
• Golden Snitch: The hot hatch challenge in "The Youth Vote" works like this - the trio compete in a series of challenges to try and appeal to millennials, with each successive challenge being worth more points. The final challenge is to see who can get the most hits on YouTube. May goes into that final challenge with a single point, and yet his video gets so many more hits than the other presenters' that he wins the whole thing by a total of 5,000 points.
• Gone Horribly Right: During "Opera, Art & Donuts", in an attempt to get Richard Hammond off their backs, Clarkson persuades the group to take a detour into Vicenza and sends out a tweet publicizing Hammond's impending arrival. His intention is that Hammond's car will get mobbed by perhaps a few hundred fans, blocking him in place while Clarkson and May drive off. Instead, all three of them are swarmed by several thousand fans and it takes Clarkson and May quite some time to push their way through the crowd. Hammond does wind up staying behind, and doesn't catch up for over a day.
• "Groundhog Day" Loop: In "Operation Desert Stumble", each time a presenter dies, the boys have to restart the course over again from the beginning. As they are not trained military personnel, they die. A lot.
  Clarkson: Is there anyone on God's green Earth less capable than- [May is shot; repeat ad nauseam]
• Happy Dance: James likes to do these. He dances after the presenters finally find a road in Namibia, he briefly engages in one after he beats Hammond at Car Battleship, and when he goes the fastest around the Sitges-Terramar track in "Blasts From the Past."
• Hoist by His Own Petard: During the Namibia special, May decides to get revenge on Clarkson for the "dickshift" by mounting the Clarkson buggy's front spoiler on comically high struts. While he's busy rigging it up, however, sparks from his angle grinder ignite the dry ground and start a fire... under the front of May's own buggy. Which he has apparently forgotten has a hole in the petrol tank. By the time he's put it out, the entire front end of the buggy is burnt and blackened to a crisp. Fortunately it's rear-engined, otherwise the fire would have gutted his car completely.
• Hot Potato: Done with May's "dickshift" in the Namibia episode when he and Clarkson toss it back and forth into each other's buggies. In one particularly magnificent shot, May smacks Clarkson in the face with it.
• Hypocritical Humor:
  • In "Berks To The Future", Hammond and May criticize Clarkson for having spent £14,000 of the show's budget building a car that was only valued at a fraction of that price. Hammond also criticises May's segment on electric cars as a waste of time. The last segment of the same episode revolves around Hammond building increasingly elaborate armoured vehicles to deal with a post-apocalyptic scenario, only for Clarkson and May to blow them all up in increasingly spectacular ways — first a rocket launcher, then a Challenger tank, then a freaking Royal Navy destroyer — the entire segment must have cost dozens, if not hundreds of times more than the £14,000 the Excellent cost.
  • In the Season 2 premiere, Hammond, driving the futuristic electric Rimac Concept One, keeps complaining about all the noise Clarkson's old-fashioned Lamborghini Aventador makes, while he took great joy in harassing May with the loud engine noises of his Dodge Hellcat during "Opera, Art and Donuts", the third episode from the previous season.
• I Call It "Vera": In the Mongolia episode, the trio determines that they should name the car that they assembled themselves, and ultimately decide on "John."
• Improbable Aiming Skills: After being instructed to deal with the sniper in "Operation Desert Stumble", Clarkson first locates said gunman (who is kneeling atop a cliff) before countersniping him. With a handgun.
  Clarkson: YEEEES! What a shot! I'll never be able to do that again.
  Hammond: [off-screen] Jeremy!! James has electrocuted himself.
  Clarkson: Oh, what a f-- ["time loop" restarts]
  • And, because the whole film takes on the form of a repeating "Groundhog Day" Loop (meaning that the sniper is in the exact same spot, like a videogame), Clarkson is able to do this again on the next loop. Without looking.
• I'll Be in My Bunk: Hammond says that he "needs some time alone" after seeing a 1968 Dodge Charger with a 1000 hp Hellcat Engine.
• Incredibly Lame Fun: For "Past, Present, and Future", Hammond has the boys go around Lucerne, Switzerland visiting museums dedicated to topics such as chess and pencils, in addition to the Swiss Museum of Transport. Hammond later admits that he's doing this because all those places are close to a fast-charging station he wants to use for his electric supercar.
• I Need a Freaking Drink:
  • The first thing Hammond and May seek out after three frustrating and dangerous days in the Namibian desert; beer .
  • The first thing acrophobic May seeks out after traversing high above a river on his "buggy cable car;" more beer.
  • After spending four days eating kale at a wellness retreat, Clarkson and May gorge on bratwurst for breakfast before a hill climb event.
  • Subverted in the Niagara Falls race when Clarkson calls JetBlue's customer service and tells them that May and Hammond are recently out of rehab and to not serve them drinks during their flight from NYC to Buffalo.
  • The Mongolia special turns this into a running gag with the presenters not having any alcohol among their rations.
  • It's noted repeatedly in "Sand Job" that while Mauritania, being a Muslim country, has no alcohol, their destination - Senegal - does. After their first attempt at crossing the Senegal River ends in soggy failure, Hammond motivates Clarkson to try again by reminding him of what's waiting for him on the other side - and when they finally do make it to the other side, the very first thing they do is search out the nearest bar and have several pints.
• Insistent Terminology: In "Art, Opera, and Donuts", Clarkson is driving a dark orange car. Hammond and May insist at every opportunity that it is actually brown. This gag has continued on their Twitter accounts long after the episode aired, and received a Call-Back in two Season 3 episodes.
• Intentionally Awkward Title:
  • The first special of "Season 4" featured a boating trip. Naturally, they titled it Seamen.
  • The second "Season 4" special; A Massive Hunt. Now what rhymes with "Hunt"?^note The release trailer reveals they wanted to call it "epic" instead of "massive", just to make the joke more obvious.
  • The third special is by far less explicit but no less awkward for entirely different reasons; Lochdown.
  • Carnage A Trois is a pun on "ménage-à-trois."
• Irony: Hammond attempts to demonstrate how well an air cannon will work launching cars for Car Battleships. The first thing that Hammond successfully blows up is the Health & Safety van.
• It Makes Sense in Context:
  • In Season 1, Episode 2, "Operation Desert Stumble", there are many, many lines. Listing them all would take all day!
    Clarkson: James just shot the Queen in the back of the head!
    Hammond: Well, now what're we gonna do?!
  • In Season 3, Episode 11, "Sea to Unsalty Sea''
    Hammond: Why did you glue Nigel Mansell's head to my bonnet?
  • In "Eurocrash"
    Clarkson Nigel Mansell's Head Has Come Off!
• Jumping the Shark: Discussed and lampshaded in "A Massive Hunt", after Clarkson explains that it's illegal to swim in the sea around Réunion due to the number of shark attacks there:
  Hammond: Well, look, it's only shallow. If a shark comes, we can jump it.
  Clarkson: [chuckling] I think we did that in... 2013?
  [both chuckle]
• Key Under the Doormat: In "Operation Desert Stumble", after May fails to hotwire a truck the presenters are trying to use to escape, Hammond lampshades this by asking May if he has "not seen every movie ever made" before retrieving the truck's key from the sun visor.
• Knife Fight: Again in "Operation Desert Stumble", Hammond and a terrorist engage in one, and Hammond even gets to quip "Let's dance!"
  • Though this becomes Never Bring a Knife to a Gun Fight after Hammond loses. Once the next loop gets to his fight on the wing of the plane, he simply draws his rifle and shoots the terrorist point-blank.
• Laser-Guided Karma:
  • When James attempts to sabotage the front of Jeremy's buggy with a saw in the Namibia Special, sparks fly out and cause the front of James' own buggy to catch fire.
  • At the start of the Mozambique special, Clarkson is distracted by his faulty gearbox while towing May's Mercedes and accidentally reverses into it, bashing a hole in the front grille. Later on, when the group encounter a long stretch of road filled with puddles, James constantly breaks down because of water entering through the broken grille and stalling the engine, forcing Clarkson to wait continuously while May restarts his car.
  • In Lochdown, to get back at May for taking too long in the bathroom, Hammond and Clarkson use a fire hose to fill his caravan with water, which floods out and soaks him when he opens the door. Later, Hammond and Clarkson lose their own caravans in separate accidents, meaning May's soaked caravan is all they have left. Subverted, almost to Karma Houdini levels, when they realise that they can just find an abandoned castle and stay there for the night, ditching the caravans entirely.
• Leave the Camera Running: Early on in "Sand Job" is a shot of a very, very long train that goes on for about 90 seconds.
• Leave No Witnesses: While most of the occupants of the airliner containing their VIP hostage in "Operation Desert Stumble" were mannequins, James ensures that their departure is at least unseen.
  Clarkson: Are all the terrorists dead back there?
  May: Everybody's dead back there.
  Clarkson: Good man!
• Lethal Chef:
  • In "Feed the World", after Clarkson's ice machine breaks, he rigs up a way to smoke the fish while on the road... by using exhaust directly from his diesel engine. Optimistically calling them kippers fools no one.
  • In Lochdown, May insists on cooking the trio "traditional Scottish cuisine", which apparently translates to deep-frying everything. Peas, eggs... everything. While Clarkson and Hammond do eat it, they're visibly disgusted, and Clarkson's narration claims it ended up making them sick.
• Lighter and Softer: Season 4 and 5, compared to the previous three. A change in format (and contractual agreements with Amazon) means the trio abandon their short clips and focus on documentary-style movies, with special mentions to what's great about a particular topic they're discussing instead of making jokes and criticizing things to no end. They also take more of each other's jokes and pranks in better nature, often finding them Actually Pretty Funny instead of the forced, staged animosity prevalent before.
• Live-Action Cartoon: The promo, "James May is Alive", in which May goes about his normal day while barely dodging death. After he goes to visit his co-presenters in hospital (a jab at Hammond's accident and Clarkson's illness earlier in the year), he gets into his car and promptly gets a dumpster dropped on it. His reaction? A deadpan "ow."
• Loophole Abuse:
  • In "Blasts From the Past," neither Clarkson's Aston Martin or Hammond's Jaguar were road-legal. Clarkson got around it as his car was registered as a prototype, and therefore okay to drive. Hammond's, however, was a test vehicle which could only be driven by one of Jaguar's test drivers. So, in order to drive it for the episode, Hammond had to be hired as a Jaguar employee. He promptly resigns after the episode airs.
  • Attempted but failed during the football match in Colombia of the Grand Tour crew versus the local help. The soundman, Kiff, blocks the ball and gets flagged for a handball. They try to get it dismissed on the basis that Kiff didn't technically use his hand; he blocked it with his prosthetic hook. The referees don't buy it.
  • Towards the end of "A Scandi Flick", the presenters are running out of time to reach the airport before their flight, but they don't dare break the speed limit because of how harsh Finland's anti-speeding laws are. Of course, those laws don't apply if you're driving across the frozen lake running next to the road...
• Lovable Rogue: The persona all Jaguar drivers have, according to the trio. They can do questionable things, like take hotel towels to save the staff the trouble of cleaning them, "borrow" silverware and artwork, and drink most of a bottle of wine to determine if it's been corked or not. But it's okay, because they drive a Jaaaaaaaag...
• Made of Iron: Clarkson's Jeep Cherokee from the Colombia special, which made it through the entire 1,300-mile journey with only minor cosmetic damage and a disconnected stereo, never once breaking down or developing a mechanical fault. Hammond and May note with incredulity that this is the first time this has ever happened in any of their foreign specials.
  • "John" from the Mongolia special; despite being assembled from a box of parts in the middle of the Mongolian steppe, the car endures multiple bogs, pouring rain (with only improvised bodywork) and several river crossings over the course of a multiple-hundreds-of-miles journey with the only breakdown being a minor fuse that is easily replaced.
• Manly Tears: Clarkson chokes up quite a bit as they sign-off during the Season 3 finale, when the presenters announce that the show (in its current form) is ending. Hammond remarks they've been working together for 17 years, and a montage runs that includes footage from both The Grand Tour and Top Gear. Also, both the presenters and the studio audience reflect on favourite moments from both series. Clarkson later mentioned in the press that part of the reason he was so overcome was that due to his dismissal, he hadn't truly gotten a chance to say goodbye to Top Gear, and was finally afforded a chance to do so.
• My Friends... and Zoidberg: In Episode 7 of Series 3, where the trio drive around the Scottish Highlands in an Alfa Romeo, a Lancia, and a Fiat, Jeremy and James refer to their cars as "Italian classics, and Hammond's Fiat".
  • Done again in the following episode: Clarkson and May bring proper recreational vehicles to their RV trip, whereas Hammond brings a pickup truck. Cue multiple references to "our RVs, and Hammond's truck".
• National Geographic Nudity: During the Namibia Special, a group of local ladies, all of whom are topless, dance while Hammond tries to fix his car nearby. He tries to be polite and acknowledge the dancing while being gentlemanly by not openly staring.
• Never Trust a Trailer: The trailer for Lochdown showed Clarkson driving at speed towards May's beached Cadillac, with May yelling "CLARKSON!", making it look like another example of the "Clarkson hitting May's car" running gag. The yell is actually stock audio taken from a different part of the episode, and in context, May (who's blocking their pontoon bridge) is actually encouraging Clarkson to ram him.
• Noodle Incident: During Motown Funk Jeremy recounts how the last time he came to downtown Detroit someone held a gun to his head. No more detail is ever given.
• Not-So-Fake Prop Weapon: Hammond notes the SAS (British special forces) soldiers who demonstrate the survival course in "Operation Desert Stumble" for the presenters were using real weapons. Clarkson insists they did not and takes a nearby assault rifle and shoots it at an old Mercedes 280SL. The rifle does has live rounds and he succeeds in blowing out the car's tyres and windows. And, as Clarkson is a lefty and the shell casings eject from the right side of the weapon, some of the hot casings hit him, cutting into and bloodying up his right arm.
• Oh, Crap!: Clarkson and May's off-camera reactions to Hammond's Rimac crash are a very serious version of this played absolutely straight. Both of them seriously thought he might have been killed.
  Clarkson: And I can feel it now; the coldness. My knees turning to jelly. It was Hammond who'd crashed.
  May: But I knew, in the blossoming, white-hot ball of pure, sickening horror forming in my heart, that it must be Hammond's Rimac.
• Once Done, Never Forgotten:
  • Hammond's Rimac crash. Unlike Hammond's dragster crash in 2006 when filming Series 9 of Top Gear, which the presenters agreed not to joke about and have only mentioned sparingly since, Clarkson and May mock Hammond regarding the Rimac crash at every available opportunity. Even Rimac themselves got in on the act: in "Bah Humbug-atti", the Series 2 Christmas episode, Hammond is presented with the watch he had been wearing at the time of the crash, fire-damaged and scratched, but still working, in a display case. Rimac retrieved it from the wreckage and engraved the case with the words "Built by the Swiss, perfected by the British". Rimac's next car, the Nevera (previously the C_Two), even has an Easter egg with the leather strap holding the car's fire extinguisher mocking Hammond.
  • In August 2017, Clarkson was taken to hospital with pneumonia. Given that he was in Majorca^note The capital of the Balearic Islands off the coast of Spain, a popular resort and holiday destination at the time, Hammond and May refuse to believe this and insist that he was just badly hungover after a drinking binge, and mock him about it at every chance they get. May, (much like the gag with Hammond's watch), during "Bah-humbug-atti" gives Clarkson a 'gift' of a t-shirt of the X-rays of his infected lungs.^note Which, actually, showed a quite serious infection. Clarkson ultimately spent nearly two weeks in hospital, and took nearly two months to fully recover.
  • To a lesser extent, James May keeps getting grief from the other two for having his famous long hair cut short before the recording of the tent sections.
• Our Lawyers Advised This Trope:
  • Parodied in "Oh Canada", during Clarkson's review of the Tesla Model X. The last time Clarkson reviewed a Tesla - the Roadster - Tesla unsuccessfully sued him over some of his claims, so to prevent the same thing happening again, Clarkson describes the Model X's flaws while driving half-a-dozen lawyers around the track. Well... he tries to describe its flaws, but gets drowned out by legalese, so before describing its biggest flaw - the £156,000 price tag - he gets out of the car and uses its Summon mode to maneuver it into a tight parking space, so the lawyers can't get out and interrupt him.
  • While the trio are test-driving muscle cars in Detroit, they come to a deserted road and opt for a drag race. Hammond has to duck out because while the Dodge Challenger SRT Demon is a powerful competitor, Fiat-Chrysler would only let him drive it if he promised not to drag race with it.
• Overly Long Gag: The final segment of one Season 3 episode has Clarkson and Hammond setting out to make travelling through airport terminals more exciting, using (respectively) a luggage case that turns into a motorised scooter and a laptop that doubles as a hoverboard. Before we actually get to that, though, we're treated to several minutes of Clarkson and Hammond making their way through an airport terminal on foot, with Clarkson ranting non-stop about every little quibble and annoyance he has with airports. Again, this goes on for several minutes, with Hammond growing increasingly exasperated.
• Overly Long Name: Opposed to the Top Gear test track in Surrey, with turns nicknamed "Chicago", "Hammerhead", "Gambon", etc, the Grand Tour test track in Swindon, the "Eboladrome", has some absurd names, including the "Isn't Straight", "Old Lady's House", the meant-for-advertisers "Your Name Here", "Field Of Sheep", and "Substation". Most are based on whatever object happens to be closest to that part of the track.
• Police Are Useless: Clarkson and Hammond express no small amount of outrage when their scheme to get James busted for speeding on a French motorway fails completely, particularly because they had been victimized by the police on that same stretch of road back on Top Gear. This prompts them to make several cracks about the Skewed Priorities of the Gendarmes.
  • A Running Gag from Clarkson's "David Souffle" series on YouTube. The titular character, a Belgian traffic warden, invariably fails to do his job, as he's drawn away by the siren song of pastries.
• Pop-Up Trivia: Turning on Amazon's "X-Ray" feature reveals more info about the cars, music, filming, Britishisms, obscure references, and the occasional snarky comment.
  [from Season 2, Episode 2]: "Central Park is the most visited park in whole of the United States. It is so-named because it is central, and a park."
• Potty Failure: In the Georgia episode, the three are instructed to drink enough water to make them have to go to the bathroom and then take a lap to see if their times improved. As Hammond painfully waits for May to finish using the bathroom, Clarkson saunters in by revealing that he "solved the problem." He peed his pants.
• Precision F-Strike: Jeremy lets off an uncensored "Oh fuck!" while crossing the South China Sea during the "Seamen" special.
  • Richard drops an uncensored "fuck" in "A Massive Hunt" after realising that the clutch in his car has been completely destroyed.
• The Problem with Pen Island: Naturally, the three hosts took invoking this trope over from Top Gear.
  • The show itself was advertised with the hashtag #amazonshitcarshow.
  • And then there was that one time when the three hosts wore garments labelled with automobile brands and stood in such a way that they read something else upon first glance: McLaren P1 (Clarkson), Jaguar E-Type (Hammond), Nissan (May).
  • In another episode, Clarkson and May got Hammond a pair of running shoes with Morgan Plus (the name of a car Hammond is quite fond of) embroidered on them. The embroidery was done in such a way that one shoe read "Morg Pl" and the other "an us". While holding up the second shoe, Hammond pointed out that he couldn't possibly use them...because he'd broken his leg in the Rimac crash and wasn't allowed to do any running.
• Product Placement:
  • The tight turn at the head of the 'Eboladrome' track is nicknamed 'Your Name Here', with the idea it will be adorned with banners from advertisers, who will get their money's worth when cars are shot in slow-motion as they drift through the turn. Early episodes show no takers, as the turn only has simple, white banners with 'Your Name Here' on the fencing. However, in episode 4, the turn finally got its first sponsor, Swindon Springs, which Clarkson promptly misreads as "Swindon Swings".
  • DHL is a show sponsor: banners are placed in other parts of the track, and DHL trucks show up occasionally on the show. There is also footage on Twitter of the three presenters having a contest to assemble a standard DHL box the fastest. Clarkson, naturally, goes for his All-Solving Hammer.
    • The second season credit sequence is more overt, showing DHL trucks and handlers as the tent is being assembled.
  • There are also ads supporting the Science Museum at Wroughton, who own the airfield the Eboladrome is on.
• Purple Prose: Richard always segues into Conversation Street with overly-flowery language.
• Put On a Racing Bus: The American was dropped between the first and second seasons due to Mike Skinner's dissatisfaction with the way the character was written.
  Hammond: ...and because you all hated him.
  • The Bus Came Back: In "International Buffoon's Vacation", Clarkson repeatedly spots a man wearing The American's racing coveralls, often pointing at him threateningly from improbable locations. His identity is never confirmed, but the joke stands.
• A Rare Sentence:
  • From events in the Namibia episode, Hammond comes up with an odd news snippet: "James May died in an exploding beach buggy holding a rubber penis."
  • Also lampshaded by Clarkson when he notes: "This is something that nobody has ever said before, but Namibia is a beautiful bastard of a country."
  • No less bizarre but with less attention called to it is when Clarkson is grappling with Chinese cuisine: "My tongue is completely wrapped up in intestines."
  • Clarkson gets in another lampshaded one in Eurocrash when, after the arrow-dodging challenge, he remarks, "I'm alive, but Nigel Mansell's been decapitated and my candelabra's been smashed to bits, and that's a sentence that's never been said before in history."
• Real Life Writes the Plot:
  • In the series premiere, Clarkson makes a Side Bet with Hammond and May before the timed laps of the hypercars begin: if the P1 loses, Hammond and May can come and knock his house down. When the segment returns to the studio (err, tent) for the times to be revealed, Hammond and May squeal with glee when Clarkson winds up losing the bet. The fact is Clarkson had already demolished the house two weeks before the audience segment for the episode was taped in Los Angeles, so the bet was really just a set-up for a segment with Hammond & May that airs on the third episode of the show.
    • From the same episode, it's mentioned that the Eboladrome had to be redesigned slightly when the construction team found a small hazard: an unexploded bomb from World War II.
  • Season 2, Episode 2 features a race between Clarkson (in a car) vs. Hammond and May (using public transport and a plane) to get from Central Park in New York City to Prospect Point at Niagara Falls. As it was taped after Hammond's crash in the Rimac, and so consequently he is on crutches, it puts the pair of presenters at a disadvantage.
    • The Amazon X-Ray feature reveals Clarkson has his own problem that slows him down — he can't pay directly at the pump during his fuel stops, and has to pay through the cashier, since the card reader requires entering in an American zip code.
  • While they are meant to stay discreetly in the background, and the presenters are meant to work out most issues for themselves, at times the camera crew or support staff are called upon to help with repairs or to get them out of a particularly bad jam. So, when they are actually referred to on-camera, like when Clarkson radios the crew during the Namibia Special in Season 1, or when they're seen driving to the site of the Rimac crash in the Season 2 premiere, then it means things have gotten quite perilous. Or when it's funny, like when the failing brakes on Jeremy's Alfa cause him to smack into the camera car.
    • Subverted in "Up, Down, And Round The Farm", when the crew is shown beleaguered by Clarkson's antics trying to film his rally-car video. The exasperated director is Phil Churchward, who also came from Top Gear and has directed all the episodes of the series to date.
    • Subverted yet again in Season 3's Mongolian Special, when the camera crew, driving a tricked-out Land Rover, becomes stuck in a bog, requiring the presenters (in their makeshift, and hand-built, offroader, "John") to pull them out.
  • Subverted in Season 2, Episode 4's "Unscripted" — while the travel segments in Croatia (with Clarkson driving an Audi TT RS, Hammond in an Ariel Nomad, and May in a Lada) were, according to Clarkson, entirely unscripted, the episode just plays out (deliberately) as a series of missed opportunities, comical mistakes, comments and monologues trailing away, and May mostly off on his own, all because it's supposedly "unscripted" and was not planned out in advance as it usually is: like when an airport isn't available for a drag race, or a Croatian model keeps the lap times instead of a member of the crew, and May's ridiculous "fire engine challenge" that only he takes part in.
  • The social media savvy of each of the presenters is challenged in Season 3, Episode 10, "The Youth Vote", as each presenter is tasked with showing off their respective hot hatchbacks, scoring points for how often they are snapped by paparazzi alongside the car and how many hits the cars receive on YouTube and Instagram. May wins the challenge with a literal unboxing video of his Toyota Yaris.
  • "Sand Job" ends with the trio forced to abandon their quest to drive to Dakar just miles from the finish line, due to a violent outbreak of rioting that meant it was too dangerous for them to enter.
• Recycled Premise:
  • Chris Harris, for an episode of his Internet series Chris Harris on Cars, took the same three 'Holy Trinity' cars out for timed laps at Portimao as well, beating The Grand Tour to the Internet by a few months.
    • Harris' results had the P1 beating the Porsche by .41 seconds, and the LaFerrari (which came 2nd in The Grand Tour shootout) coming in last, losing to the P1 by .68 seconds.
    • Harris used the same make of tyres just as The Grand Tour did, so the difference in finish could be more on the driver or road conditions than the car's performance. It's also interesting to note that Harris' times were all faster than D'Ambrosio's times - by between .4 and 1.25 seconds!.
    • And like Clarkson noted towards the end of the shootout episode, When Harris used the P1 with its stock Pirelli Trofeo R tyres, it made it even faster, with Harris shaving another 1.79 seconds off his laptime.
    • Ironically, six months later, Harris became a presenter for Top Gear when the show was rebooted with Chris Evans and Matt LaBlanc. Seven episodes of Chris Harris On Cars (including the Trinity shootout) were later broadcast on BBC America in the Summer of 2016.
    • It would appear the cars were available for multiple members of the press to play with for a time, because MotorTrend magazine also did a test at Portimao, but only between the P1 and the 918. Like it did on The Grand Tour, the Porsche came out on top. Going by the number plates, they do seem to be same two cars Harris and The Grand Tour both used.
  • The second season dispenses with Celebrity Brain Crash, and introduces Celebrity Face-Off, where two celebrities (who actually appear in the studio, without comically dying before getting there) run lap times against each other in a Jaguar F-type on a new, rougher (part paved, part-gravel) track. Having two celebrity guests compete and using a higher-end car on a rougher track were both introduced during the Chris Evans-led Series 24 of Top Gear. ^note And both shows abandoned them the following season.
  • Andy Wilman, the executive producer, in his off-screen messages and texts, is more or less taking the part of the card-handing, white lab-coated assistants that served the same function in Top Gear — outlining a challenge, berating the presenters for their stupidity, or getting upset at their lack of progress.
  • While it's to be expected with two similar car shows, a pretty funny example of this occurs when The Grand Tour's seventh episode of Series 3, 'Well Aged Scotch' includes Clarkson reviewing the latest BMW M5, while the 2nd episode of Series 26 of Top Gear, that airs just three days later, has Chris Harris reviewing... the latest BMW M5. Both reviewers also put the car against a challenger — Clarkson pits it against a M5 custom-tuned by Alpina, while Harris puts his against a Mercedes-AMG E63 S. ^note and each reviewer ultimately picks the challenger over the M5.
    • It happens again when, in Series 3's 9th episode "Aston, Astronauts and Angelina’s Children" Richard Hammond reviews the 2019 Aston Martin Vantage. Eight days later, when the concluding episode of Series 26 of Top Gear airs, Chris Harris puts it through its paces. ^note Hammond loves it, Harris prefers a similarly-spec'd Mercedes instead.
  • The majority of the 3rd episode of Series 30 of Top Gear takes place in Scotland, where The Grand Tour filmed its third episode of Series 4 in July 2020. While the Top Gear episode was broadcast in March 2021, the Grand Tour episode filmed, "Lochdown" wouldn't air until July.
• Running Gag:
  • Each episode begins with Clarkson giving a preview of what to expect "on this (car) show/program" and listing three mundane events that are usually not even car-related, including just showing May falling over three times in the Season 1 finale.
  • The "Conversation Street" intros, showing the three presenters in silhouette while they converse, changes every episode. There's usually a gag or clearly something out of place.
  • 'Celebrity Brain Crash' set itself up to be an audience interview segment but the celebrities end up dead or killed. It also ends with the exchange:
    James: ...Does that mean (s)he's not coming on, then?
    Richard: Well, James, [graphic description of what just happened], so that would be a "no"!
  • Several episodes feature two of the presenters wanting to compare a pair of cars for a particular purpose and going to some exotic location to do so, only for the third presenter to butt in with his own car.
  • The second season brings back the old "In this episode..." gag from Top Gear where Clarkson lists three inane, weird, or out-of-context events that happen at some point later on.
  • The Mozambique special has May getting splashed by the water in his aquarium, and Hammond falling off his cheap motorbike. May tries to put a stop to the former by putting a tarpaulin over the top, but Clarkson subtly sabotages it so he gets splashed again; as for the latter, Clarkson remarks that Hammond has fallen off so many times he's actually gotten bored of watching it.
  • Season 3 had a running gag of Clarkson describing an awful celebrity segment that was planned, but has had to be cut as they've run out of time.
  • Clarkson and May make a pact during the Mongolia special to not let Hammond drive "John" out of fear he'll crash it somehow. When they do begrudgingly allow Hammond to drive it, it is only for a few stolen moments before they make him stop because they've reached their intended destination.
  • Eurocrash has James May constantly missing out on the trio's planned stops due to his Crosley's sluggish top speed and poor reliability.
• Scenery Porn: Any and all of the specials, but perhaps most notably the Mongolia special, which due to the low population density, is nothing but scenery porn.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here!: The Rimac Concept One in this video. As Clarkson aptly put it:
  Clarkson: That Rimac just fucks off!
• Self-Deprecation: During the Seamen special, when the team has time to kill:
  Clarkson: Guys, I've got my iPad, I can watch a movie. There's a show on Prime Video here, it's called The Grand Tour.
  Hammond: I don't like it.
  May: It's rubbish.
  Hammond: There's this one bloke on it I can't stand.
• Series Continuity Error: In "Moroccan Roll", watch closely during Hammond's lap. As he drives into the Egyptian temple, his Mazda has a big unexplained dent in the side and is missing a side skirt. When it comes out the other side, it's fine again, and remains fine until the end of the lap, when he sideswipes a statue. Cue dent and missing side skirt. In other words, footage of Hammond's "one lap" was actually stitched together from multiple attempts. ^note As it was on the previous show, footage occasionally has to be re-shot after races, but the results themselves are genuine.
  • Done heavily and lampshaded heavily in the second season as Hammond breaking his leg meant he appears in the studio fine while presenting footage of him while still dealing with the injury. Before this though is the fact that between the location and tent shots James May dramatically changed his hair, a discontinuity the trio try to play as even worse than Hammond's injury. In the end-of-year awards, though, Hammond comes out on top, (by switching cars in a cut during the middle of a review) winning a water bottle that is small in Clarkson's hands but once the camera cuts to Hammond taking hold of it, becomes five-gallon sized.
• Shovel Strike: During the "Groundhog Day" Loop that forms the main feature of "Operation Desert Stumble", when Clarkson gets stuck in the window and... ahem, locates the terrorists, he pleads for his co-stars to "kill" him. In the end, Hammond bludgeons him with a shovel.
• Side Bet: During the 'Holy Trinity' shootout, Clarkson makes an arguably bigger bet than changing his name to "Jennifer" this time - he bets Hammond and May that if the P1 loses, they can come around and knock his house down. In the end, Hammond's Porsche wins the shootout, beating May's Ferrari by only .2 seconds, but beats the P1 by 1.3 seconds. ^note Clarkson defends the P1, noting that when they used the car's included tyres (Pirelli Trofeo Rs) it was the fastest, but for the shootout the same make tyres (Pirelli PZero Corsas) were used to even the test.
• Simulated Urban Combat Area: Used in the mission in "Operation Desert Stumble": it is a special forces training area located in Jordan.
• Single-Episode Handicap: In ''The Falls Guys," thanks to Hammond's crash the episode before, he and May must engage in one of their public transportation vs. car races against Clarkson. However, May refuses to help Hammond out most of the time, reasoning it's Hammond's fault he's hurt since he was dumb enough to crash the car in the first place. As a result, Hammond struggles in getting from place to place on crutches and in wheelchairs, slowing the two down significantly. He notes in Conversation Street how difficult it was for him to get around during the race, even with so-called accommodations for the disabled. Likewise, May remarked in a TV interview he did not help Hammond out since it was in-character on the show for him to do so, but he expected others would. He was very surprised at how few people offered any assistance to his travelling companion, even when he clearly needed help.
• Small Reference Pools: As they travelled from city to city for the first season tapings, the presenters slipped in references for their local audience to keep them amused. Some of them get explained for the global audience, such as the South African prime minister's "counting" skills. Sometimes, they don't, which has gotten the show into trouble: during the "Happy Finnish Christmas" episode, Hammond made strange jokes about not eating ice cream because he wasn't gay, and was taken to task by the British and American press by it. It turns out he was referencing a well-known ad in Finland about two men starting a gay relationship over ice cream.
• The Snack Is More Interesting: During "Operation Desert Stumble," James is sent down a hill into a highly-exposed area to steal a car. The car is being watched by a sniper and May constantly keeps getting shot, forcing the group to restart the entire mission over and over again. After his fifth attempt, Richard and Jeremy start bringing baskets full of goodies from the high-end boutique store Fortnum & Mason to munch on while waiting for May. However, they never get to enjoy them, because no matter how fast they try to prepare their food, James always gets shot just as they are about to eat and they have to leave to begin again.
  • This could also be seen as a Call-Back — May brought food from F&M when he and Clarkson drove a Toyota Hilux to the North Pole on their previous show.
• Speak in Unison: In the first episode of the second series, Hammond and May's "You ungrateful bastard!!" upon learning that Jeremy hadn't unboxed a gift from his children due to an aversion to the squeaking noise polystyrene packing makes.
• Springtime for Hitler: In Lochdown, the trio compete in a challenge pitting three American cars against three Soviet-era cars to see which is the worst, with the "winner" (i.e. the worst car) being the one that breaks down first. The trio, driving the American cars, quickly get the idea to turn the event into a demolition derby, and start ramming the opposition in the hope of breaking their own cars in the process. They instead succeed in breaking the cars they're ramming into; Clarkson knocks out Hammond by accident, and he and May then systematically (and accidentally) knock out the three Soviet cars, leaving them the last cars standing.
• Start My Own:
  • When Clarkson was let go by the BBC, Hammond and May choose to leave Top Gear also. The show's executive producer (and Clarkson's childhood friend) Andy Wilman decided to move on too, and so the four started their own production company, W. Chump and Sons, which led to them creating their own car show with Amazon.
  • The four also created a new online car enthusiast community called DriveTribe , along with further investments from former EMI exec Ernesto Schmitt and 20th Century Fox.
• Suddenly Shouting: Hammond during the Colombia special, after he gets fed up of Clarkson's plan to drive up a volcano in search of condors:
  Hammond: You've led us up the side of a volcano, you've got oxygen for you and yourself only, and we can see NOTHING!
  • Also, Hammond again, in "Dumb Fight at the O.K. Coral", after the boat that Jeremy bought capsizes and results in Jeremy and Richard in the water, this gem occurs:
    Clarkson: You're swimming like an old lady.
    Hammond: I DON'T LIKE BEING IN THE BLOODY WATER!!!!!!!!!! FACT!!!!!!!!! I'M NOT COMFORTABLE, I'M FROM BIRMINGHAM!!
• Take That!: Some digs to (and from) the BBC, after the presenters had left Top Gear:
  • Clarkson's Fire Stick ad, as he browses through the different content channels:
    Clarkson ... Demand5, Netflix, [advancing to BBC iPlayer] ...that...
  • James May, during the first episode of the second series of his show Cars Of The People:
    May: [concerning getting rid of the Morris Minor] But actually, would we really notice? Would it in fact give us a chance to move on? It might be a little bit as if a very popular and well-liked television programme suddenly came to an end. Everybody would think it was a disaster. But after a while, they'd get over it.
  • Clarkson, after being let go from Top Gear, was the guest host of the 50th season premiere of the BBC series Have I Got News for You in October 2015, and took a fair amount or ribbing - especially from guest contestant Richard Osman. ^note One could argue Clarkson had the last laugh, because his lucrative deal with Amazon was announced just a couple of weeks later.
  • The series premiere begins with Clarkson walking out of a generic replacement for BBC Television Centre, turning in his badge and then walking away in the rain, for the weather to clear up as he arrives in America for his new start.
  • When they introduce each other on stage during the series premiere, they list off the various times they've been fired from various jobs, but, when they get to Clarkson, Hammond admits he technically has never been fired from anything. ^note Clarkson's contract for Top Gear was simply not renewed, which means that Clarkson can still work with the BBC if he chooses. This allowed him to appear on Have I Got News for You in 2015 and on QI in 2016.
  • In the Season 1 Christmas Special, as Hammond is driving the new, right-hand drive Mustang around London, and gets to the Cenotaph, he explains that the monument is "...where we remember who died for us". Then he continues: "Slowing down a bit here... show some respect" — a jab at Top Gear alluding to when, during the filming for Series 23, Matt LeBlanc and rally-car driver Ken Block did donuts in front of the memorial, which angered the UK press. Host Chris Evans later apologized for the stunt and the footage eventually wasn't used in the completed segment.
  • During "Dumb Fight at the OK Coral", taped in Nashville, as they argue about the Nashville vs. Detroit music scenes, when Clarkson begin to rattle off influential Southern groups, and Clarkson says, 'The Allman Brothers', Hammond responds, 'Never heard of them'. Clarkson then doubles-down:
    Clarkson: ...they had that one hit... instrumental... what was it called? Jeb... Jennifer! You never hear it anymore—
    May: Oh, I hated that.
    Clarkson: You never hear it anymore, do you?
    May: No... rubbish.
    Hammond: Weirdest thing, weirdest thing. ^note The Allman Brothers' song "Jessica" is the theme for Top Gear. "Jennifer" was the name of the specific remix.
  • Subverting the trope, the jibes at Top Gear noticeably go down in Series 2, and in Series 3 are non-existent. And in a nice surprise, the BBC allowed footage from the show in be incorporated into the retrospective montage that runs during the last episode of Series 3, and as such are thanked in the end credits.
• Take That, Audience!: The Season 2 episode "Unscripted", levelled at fans who frequently complain about how scripted the show has become. By having a segment without a basic script to use as an outline, it shows how things go wrong without the rough ideas in place since tracks can't be found or booked in time, the presenters wander aimlessly since routes go unplanned, everyone picks a completely different type of car to test, Clarkson takes ages to come up with hyperbolic analogies about the car's systems, May engages in a challenge the other two refuse to participate in, and so on.
• Tempting Fate:
  • Throughout the early part of "A Massive Hunt", Clarkson and Hammond repeatedly rib May over his claim that the roads in Madagascar are the worst in the world, pointing out the good quality of the roads around their starting location and insisting that they can't possibly be as bad as May's friend claimed they were. Hammond actually remarks that he hopes the roads do get worse, so that the modifications he made to his car won't have been a waste of time. The roads do get worse... and eventually they get so bad that they kill Hammond's car, something no other location the trio have been to has ever managed to do.
  • In "A Scandi Flick", with time running out until their flight, the trio take a shortcut across a frozen lake. May, driving a little away from the other two, radios them to say "Come and drive over here, it's nice and flat" — and immediately falls through the ice. Not entirely, thankfully, but still.
• This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman: The $800 motorbike Hammond buys for the Mozambique special is hilariously impractical: his fish all fall off the drying rack, Hammond himself falls off about a hundred times due to the bike's lack of grip, and it gets stuck and/or stalls almost as often on the muddy roads. Then towards the end of the challenge, the trio find the road blocked by a huge pond. Clarkson makes it through in his Nissan but ends up waist-deep in water, May tries to drive through it and completely kills his Mercedes... Hammond, on his narrow bike, just carefully drives round it.
• Tie-In Novel: The Grand Tour Guide to The World, published in October 2017, featuring abundant snark from the presenters, along with behind-the-scenes photos of the filming of the first season, along with a preview of the second, reminiscent of the Big Book Of Top Gear books that the BBC used to publish annually.
  "...Some of this book is factual, but most of it isn't. Many of the observations are incorrect and the advice idiotic."
• Tonight, Someone Dies: A vehicular version. Promotional material for "A Massive Hunt" noted that, for the first time ever, one of the trio's cars would irreparably break down and fail to finish the challenge. It turns out to be Hammond's Ford Focus, and he's forced to complete the journey on foot (luckily, he only had nine miles to go).
• Too Much Information: Clarkson and Hammond mock the concept of cars being gender-specific and Clarkson states that the only relevant gender-specific concepts are bicycles and underwear. Hammond pipes up with "sometimes" after the second example before looking abashed.
• Twitchy Eye: May develops one in "Opera, Art & Donuts" whenever Hammond or his obnoxiously loud Dodge Hellcat is near or featured in a horribly obnoxious painting.
• Unusual Euphemism: During a discussion on marketing cars specifically for men or women, May refers to women as having a "magic triangle."
  • While discussing claiming to be transgender to save money on car insurance, James blindsides everyone by calling a man's tackle a "beef torpedo".
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight:
  • One of the Conversation Street intros in Season 1 has an erotic dancer dancing in-between Hammond and Jeremy and James. Jeremy and James ignore her and converse like nothing's happening.
  • In "Sand Job", as Clarkson's Jag (which he's converted into a raft) is drifting uncontrollably across the Senegal River, he points out a local woman casually washing her clothes in the river, not even looking at him, as if this sort of thing happens every day there.
• Voodoo Doll: Hammond finds one with May's face on it while the two are tearing down Clarkson's house, during "Opera, Art & Donuts". It's not the most disturbing thing they find, though.
• Wacky Racing: "Environ-Mental" has the presenters build ecologically-sustainable car bodies, and then race them against some normal cars. Hammond's car is made of plant materials, Clarkson's car uses dead animal parts and slabs of meat, and May, after unsuccessfully using mud and then bricks, succeeds with a body made of a combination of hay and dung. However, it keeps him from seeing properly (adding to his already infamous No Sense of Direction), and it's so heavy he only completes a single lap. Then, Clarkson's car develops a problem with maggots. The regular cars obviously thrash the presenters, with the race ultimately ending when the last car standing, Hammond's, catches on fire.
• What a Piece of Junk: Hammond's Porsche 918 was challenged to a drag race in Dubai by a Nissan Patrol, which he thought was "embarrassing." Turns out the Patrol was a GT-R conversion that was easily able to outpace his Porsche.
• The World Is Just Awesome: The Mongolia special has this in spades.
• "X" Marks the Spot: Lampshaded and averted in "The Massive Hunt" as James May mentions that an X mentioned in a pirate's coded message did not mean that.
• Your Head A-Splode: May's head in the Conversation Street intro for the Season 1 finale, much to Clarkson and Hammond's surprise.