The Grand Tour specials | Seven of the Best

You’ll have seen the final instalment of The Grand Tour, of course. The last hurrah of the Holy Trinity. Say what you like about Jezza, Captain Slow and the Hamster, but there’s no question they leave a mighty legacy in their wake. Some of us – perhaps even most of us, given their 22-year career together – spent our formative years watching them ‘arse about’ in cars. And like anything you’ve grown up with, it’s sad to see it finally go. So we’ve doffed our cap in the most appropriate way possible: by rewatching old episodes and then staring at the PH classifieds for hours – a time-honoured tradition and, very occasionally, secondhand car gold…

First up, Namibia – the first (and arguably best) Grand Tour special. It’s no secret that the team went slightly mad in its opening season, partly to stick it to the BBC and partly because it had Amazon money coming out of its ears. So it went all-in on the Skeleton Coast spectacular, featuring customised beach buggies. We don’t have the space here to get into the story of Bruce Meyers’ bright idea, but suffice it to say that this appears to be a magnificent example of his dune-conquering vision for the Beetle’s rear-engined chassis. Air-cooled freedom at its noisy best. 

Let’s skip over the more troubling aspects of watching three millionaires make light of a developing nation’s ongoing struggle to properly feed its citizens, and all agree that seeing James May get soaked by his homemade aquarium was very funny. That aquarium was built inside a W123, a Mercedes model long-revered in Africa for its durability – and elsewhere, too. The show featured a 200T, but if you fancy emulating the classic, trendsetting look (let’s not forget this was the manufacturer’s first estate car) then how about this 2.3-litre 230TE which has accrued just 32k miles in four decades? Just keep it away from salt water. 

Okay, the idea of photographing wildlife for Amazon was tediously naff, but the scenery and the spectacle of Clarkson in jean cutoffs helped make up for it. The best car by a country mile was the Fiat Panda 4×4 Sisley – a rare example of May being given something he genuinely likes – but they are very rare these days. So how about a near carbon copy of the Clarkson’s wine bar special instead? The TJ generation isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but a widebody Sahara with the 4.0-litre straight-six is probably the ideal way to scratch the Wrangler itch. It isn’t fast or clever but, like the Land Rover Defender it’s often compared with, there’s no quibbling with the iconic look. 

By season 4, the show had moved to a special-only format and kicked off with two supremely watchable efforts before Covid took its toll. The boat-only Seamen was notable for some genuinely hairy moments, while the trip to Madagascar featured James May gamely submerging himself in what looked very much like sewage in a Caterham 310R. But it was Clarkson’s heavily modified V8-powered Continental GT that made the ‘worst road in the world’ look like fun. And we know the car was fun because he kept it. If you’d like a solid foundation for your own off-road project, the classifieds are full of them: here’s a lovely looking one for less than £40k. 

Following two instantly forgettable films shot (admittedly by necessity) in the UK, The Grand Tour got back to grand touring with season 5 and the Scandi Flick, an episode best remembered for May’s truly nasty smack in a tunnel, but also for featuring three cars you’d actually like to own. Purely from a desirability standpoint, Clarkson’s B7 RS4 takes the biscuit (because V8 obviously) but were we actually in Scandinavia, it would inevitably be Hammond’s Impreza WRX we’d make a beeline for. You’ll be lucky to find a V-Limited example exactly like the one featured, but this might be the next best thing – and for less than £20k, too. 

We all knew the show would be wound up before the ‘Sand Job’ was released, so there was already a wistful aspect to the team’s (sort of) effort to replicate the last leg of the Paris-Dakar. After the thoroughly average ‘Eurotrash’ entry, the team also returned to interesting cars – with so much success in fact, that Clarkson is said to have bought a Jaguar F-Type immediately after he returned to the UK. But we’ve chosen to highlight the hilarious power-to-pennies ratio of the V12-powered DB9 Volante. The innate peril of buying a 20-year-old Aston hardly needs restating in these pages, although at £34k for a car that has covered fewer than 40k miles, you should still all be tempted. 

And so, the finale. Appropriately, it simultaneously fell short of expectations and yet somehow exceeded them. Very deliberately, the show tried nothing new (indeed, it was obviously meant as a retread of tried and tested moments) and therefore occasionally suffered for it – not least in the chronological fudge (the Polar Special predated the Botswana one, and was vastly better; although understandably harder to recreate). But the mic-drop moment at the end was pitch-perfect and letting the presenters finally choose the cars they’d always wanted was a nice touch. Even nicer when you consider that last year we’d Spotted both Clarkson’s Lancia Montecarlo and May’s Triumph Stag long before the show’s producers descended on them – great minds, eh? So we’ll end on Hammond’s choice: not quite a 3.0-litre GXL, but a Mk1 Capri apparently built on one as pre-prod RS 3100. Fitting that it’s a car with a story. Recounting such tales was what Clarkson, Hammond and May did best.