The Grand Tour’s new presenters, Francis Bourgeois, James Engelsman, and Thomas Holland, seem to have hit the ground running. The new trio has become instant hits, with positive reviews as they take over from Jeremy Clarkson, James May, and Richard Hammond.
If you want to watch them in action, then you can do so on Amazon Prime right now. They have already taken part in various wild challenges, and one of them involved taking three Kei cars and attempting to turn them into a fake school bus, uploaded as a clip to Amazon Prime’s YouTube channel.
It was part of an episode where the trio took three tiny Japanese Kei cars up the legendary Pikes Peak hill climb. The only problem they faced was that the cars face all sorts of legal restrictions on American roads, so a joke plan was dreamt up to circumnavigate that.
The trio disguised the car as a single, and very long, American school bus. Yes, your eyes are not deceiving you; they really did disguise the Kei cars as a single school bus. If you are a massive fan of cars like the Autozam AZ-1, then you should probably look away now.
This Is What the Grand Tour Presenters Did
The idea to disguise the cars as a bus was to bypass local traffic laws. To do this, they hid all three of the Kei cars in a massive, hollowed-out school bus shell. Francis had the front section of the bus, while Thomas and James had the middle and rear sections, respectively. As you might expect, it wasn’t a plan that was carried out smoothly.
“I suddenly have a lot of sympathy for pantomime horses; it’s not easy,” Francis said while laughing over the radio. What really undid the plan was the ‘dreaded four-way stop,’ a staple of the American traffic system. Predictably, trying to coordinate three different cars to act as one to keep the bus shell intact didn’t go well. Thomas, for example, became trapped in the middle of the intersection. “Thomas, where are you?” they yelled. “Behind the angry man in the van,” Thomas said.
In what certainly didn’t seem scripted for TV, the trio’s escapades soon attracted the attention of the local police. It was obvious that this wasn’t scripted, as the local officer seemed to have a sense of humor bypass. “What the hell is this?” he asked. “It is a contraption that was meant to solve a problem that has not worked out, apparently,” James replied.
The officer, however, wasn’t amused. “Get this thing off the highway. Don’t drive it on our roads anymore. OK? If I see this thing moving again, you’re going to take a ride with me”.
The Trio Managed To Get Around the Local Traffic Laws
Thankfully, they didn’t end up in jail, and even though they had to ditch the bus, they did manage to sort out transport to Pikes Peak. Some locals offered ot take them to the hill climb on trailers, so they wouldn’t have to drive the cars and risk being pulled over again by the police.
The full episode is available to view on Amazon Prime Video, as is the rest of the latest series of The Grand Tour. From what we have seen, it looks like this new trio has done a brilliant job.