Ever since the departure of the previous Top Gear hosts, Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May, almost all car enthusiasts have been waiting with bated breath for their new show, “The Grand Tour“. Well, today they launched the very fist episode on Amazon Prime TV, where the show can be seen every week.
In the first episode, Clarkson introduces their new test track, while poking fun at the Top Gear test track just a bit. While Clarkson introduces us to the track as a Ferrari 488 GTB drives around it, he does a bit of a test drive on it in a BMW M2. While he claims that this wasn’t a proper road test of the M2, which will likely come later, he does have some very nice things to say about it.
By very nice things, I mean he claims it to be the best M car BMW has ever made. We already knew Clarkson was a fan of the M2, but that is a massively bold statement and one I doubt many will agree with. While we have no doubt that the M2 is the best M car currently on sale, and probably the best since the 1 Series M, calling it the best M car ever made is quite a statement considering the monumental cars that came before it.
Cars like the E28 M5, E30 M3, E46 M3 CSL and the E39 M5 are all unbelievably good cars and it’s hard to think of any modern M car being better. However, Clarkson has driven all of them and has been doing this for a long time. So it’s possible he’s on to something. He also likes making outlandish statements to piss people off and make journalists, like the idiot trying this right now, say things on the internet about how outlandish he is. So who knows, really.
Either way, it’s pretty obvious he likes the M2. Following his test drive, he puts it in the hands of The Grand Tour’s new racing driver. Some say the BBC wouldn’t let them have The Stig back, so they went out at procured a new driver. Being that the show is hosted by Amazon, which is an American company, they felt they should get an American driver. So that got Mike Skinner, of NASCAR, to do the timed laps around their test track. After they taught him to make right-hand turns, of course.
During Skinner’s lap, he makes quite a lot of colorful comments about the M2, being that he isn’t a fan because it has less than eight cylinders and isn’t made in America, so it’s clearly a communist car. Despite being a communist car, he finishes the lap and they put its time up on a board with other benchmark cars they tested. On the lap board, it actually doesn’t fair so well, being faster than only a Honda Civic Type R and slower than the BMW M3. Despite that, though, Clarkson remains headstrong that it’s better than the other M cars and, after quite a lot of friendly ribbing, the other two hosts agree that it is very good.
So, we’re only one episode into The Grand Tour, which is very good so far for those who haven’t yet seen it, and we already get a BMW M2 review. We can’t wait to see what other cars they test next week.
