Why did The Grand Tour end?
Why Clarkson, Hammond, and May ended The Grand Tour after 2024's One For The Road — in their own words — and what Amazon has done with the name since September 2026.
The Grand Tour's original run finished on 13 September 2024 with the special One For The Road, closing a 22-year on-screen partnership between Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May that began on the BBC's Top Gear in 2002 and moved to Amazon in 2016. Nobody cancelled it. The trio ended it themselves, and they were unusually specific about why.
Reason one: the job itself
Clarkson gave the bluntest version in a 2024 Sunday Times piece, announcing he was:
"too old and fat to get into the cars that I like," and not interested in driving the ones he doesn't.
He'd already told The Times the production had become a young man's game, singling out the Sahara camping on the Sand Job special as a particular low point — no hotels, no exceptions, at 64. Filming these shows means weeks of desert crossings, breakdowns, and sleeping in whatever the producers deem funny, and all three men are now in their sixties (Hammond, the "young one", is 56).
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Reason two: the map ran out
Clarkson also argued the format had exhausted its geography. In the Top Gear years the trio drove through Iraq, Syria, Crimea, and Ukraine; by 2024 whole regions they'd once crossed for a lark had become impossible to film in. His summary to The Times: "the world has shrunk and that's the tragedy." After roughly two decades of specials, the list of drivable, insurable, genuinely new destinations had grown short.
Reason three: ending it on purpose
May framed the decision as a controlled landing, telling BBC Radio 4's Today programme:
"We wanted to end it on our own terms. As we always used to say, 'We want to land it safely, not fly it into a cliff.'"
The trio's production company, W Chump & Sons, was dissolved, and each went back to his own projects — Clarkson to the farm and pub empire around Clarkson's Farm, currently the biggest hit of his career, May to travel series and his gin business. The last stretch of the run had also brought unwanted headlines, notably Clarkson's 2022 column about the Duchess of Sussex, which drew a record 25,000+ complaints to the press regulator IPSO and a public apology — context the presenters never cited, but which sat in the background of the timing.
Where the finale went — and what happened to the name
One For The Road drove Zimbabwe east to west, then crossed into Botswana to finish at the baobab on Kubu Island in the Makgadikgadi salt pans, the endpoint of their 2007 Botswana special. The episode closes with a handshake rather than a stunt.
The brand, though, belongs to Amazon, and Amazon kept it. A rebooted seventh series premiered on 4 September 2026 — six episodes, released simultaneously in more than 240 territories — fronted by Thomas Holland and James Engelsman of the YouTube channel Throttle House and trainspotter-turned-presenter Francis Bourgeois, with Studio Lambert producing and executive producer Andy Wilman confirming cameos from the original three. Holland's own assessment of accepting the job, per Amazon's announcement: "Only a moron would take that job." He took it anyway. The season covers Angola, Malaysia, and California, with Jenson Button guesting — and the format, it turns out, survives its inventors.
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