Clarkson, Hammond And May Explain Why They're Leaving The Grand Tour

We’re less than two weeks away from saying an emotional farewell to nearly 22 years of automotive TV hosted by Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May, as the final episode of The Grand Tour (or the final episode hosted by them, at least), One For The Road, is launching on 13 September.

Now, in preparation for the episode, the trio, as well as long-time producer Andy Wilman, have gone into a bit more detail on why they felt the time was right to bring the show to a close.

Earlier this year, Clarkson spoke to The Times, explaining that filming the show is “immensely physical… when you’re unfit and fat and old, which I am.” He specifically mentioned camping in the Sahara Desert during the production of recent episode Sand Job as a particularly brutal experience:  “If you’re Bear Grylls you go to a hotel – there aren’t any hotels in the Sahara.”

Clarkson has now doubled down on that ahead of One For The Road, calling the show’s production “a young man’s game.” He also explains that the show is running out of new places to visit and things to do:

“We’ve done everything you can realistically do with a car, and the world has shrunk and that’s the tragedy. Years ago, we drove from Iraq into eastern Turkey into Syria, Damascus and Israel. We did the Crimea to Ukraine. You couldn’t do any of that now.”

Hammond, meanwhile, reflected on the process of bringing this iteration of the show, and the trio’s working relationship, to an end: “The way in which [Top Gear and The Grand Tour] took off was kind of beyond all of us. The only thing we could control was how and when and where we landed it.

“We wanted to say ‘thank you’ to the audience. This is the biggest thing to happen in my life ever. It changed my life, it affected my daughters’ lives, my whole family, everything. And that’s down to the audience.”

May chimed in on why the time felt right to end things: “I’ve always said that if it ends tomorrow, which it nearly did at one point, that I should just be grateful that I had the opportunity… But it didn’t end, it kept going. In the end, we got to the point where we said, ‘No, we must stop while we’re still vaguely ahead. We mustn't keep going until we embarrass ourselves.’”

Andy Wilman, who has acted as producer alongside the trio ever since Top Gear’s 2002 reboot, also reflected on why they’ve decided to end things now, explaining that things were nearly brought to an end after the three studio-based series of The Grand Tour:

“We came to an agreement with Prime Video where we’d just do the specials as we knew that the big cinematic adventures were what our fans loved… We could keep some kind of quality control in place by doing fewer things.

“We’re lucky that we’ve been able to control our destiny. We are now calling it a day on our own terms, and not many shows get to do that. Most of the time, you want to carry on, and you get told, ‘We don’t want you anymore.’”