Article content This past Friday, three graying old men drove across the entirety of Zimbabwe in three improbable classic cars . It’s the kind of antic we’d come to expect from this crew since their first exotic “special” in 2007. And unfortunately for car enthusiasts around the globe, it was also the last time we can expect to see such buffoonery from the trio of Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May.
Internet automotive content was in its infancy in the mid-2000s when the modern Top Gear we’re all familiar with rose to prominence. Sure, Top Gear had been on television since 1977, but it was a fairly straight-laced automotive program built around consumer-advice segments and run-of-the-mill road tests. Top Gear as we know it came about in 2002, when Jeremy Clarkson began co-hosting the show with Richard Hammond.
James May would join a year later in 2003, and director Andy Wilman would oversee the group’s adventures from this rebirth all the way until the airing of the final episode of The Grand Tour , which aired September 20, 2024. If you loved cars in the mid-2000s, you didn’t have too many options for things to watch . We’re all hooked on the plethora of niche car content on YouTube these days, yes, but at the time, that website was still more focused on funny cat videos, “The Evolution of Dance,” and “Charlie Bit My Finger” more than it was on fully produced feature-length car reviews.
Of course you could wake up early on a weekend morni.