The Grand Tour S01E01

One could easily put me into the category “Fan of Top Gear” — I am pretty sure I watched the whole run at least twice and the Vietnam special too often to count.
I even watched Shouty Top Gear.

So, quite obviously I was very much looking forward to The Grand Tour — the new car show by Clarkson, Hammond and May, which appeared on Amazon some time last night. In fact I even stayed up to watch it as soon as it appeared.
As one would imagine, it is beautifully shot. Just like in their Top Gear days the cinematography is gorgeous. But — and that might be because I watched it while being very, very sleepy or because the expectations where a wee bit too high — besides that it was a bit on the “meh”-side for me. The whole studio thing with strangely scripted bits of acting was not my thing at all and when the show was over, I had a bit of a “And that was it?” feeling.

There was a test of the Porsche 918, the McLaren P1 and the Ferrari LaFerrari at Portimao. And then there was… what exactly? A BMW around a new test track. Hm.
The hypercar test was fun, but I did enjoy it a bit more when Chris Harris did exactly the same thing exactly one year ago. The best part of it was in fact when they left the racetrack and just drove the cars on normal roads — and maybe more of that is what was missing for me. Fancy cars on race tracks — I can get that everywhere else, too. And no matter how hard you try, it will always look exactly like that — like fancy cars on a race track. (To be honest, I can also get “pretty cars, nicely shot on normal roads” somewhere else but still — there’s more personality to that than a race track, even a very pretty one like Portimao.)
So — I am looking forward to the next episodes, which will probably have more of that.

Originally published at lostfocus.de.