Another season of Top Gear without its old trio has come and gone, and holy cow, I felt no nostalgia at all this time around. It was just that good.
At least, that’s what I thought while watching it. I couldn’t stop watching, to be honest. The video production was great, as expected from the Top Gear crew, and the three main hosts just worked well together—the lack of having Chris Evans around yelling at everything, the theme of steadily annoying Chris Harris, Matt LeBlanc’s weird obsession with large construction equipment, and the overall goofiness of it all. Plus, we got to see a decent amount of Sabine Schmitz!
Other than a couple of “Porsh” pronunciations of the word Porsche—I hate to sound pretentious, but the manufacturer released a video on how to pronounce its name—and having to really concentrate to follow the interview with our pal Bernie Ecclestone in the season finale, I thought the season was fantastic.
(Having to concentrate so hard during the interview was probably just because Ecclestone is soft spoken in general, and it was well worth it when he got into some weird, joking—I think—conspiracy theories about teams trying to rig the championships.)
But there was no point when I walked away from the television without pausing the show, because I didn’t want to miss a second of the episodes. The jokes hit, the segments kept my interest and the episodes were just plain enjoyable—even more so than The Grand Tour, in my opinion.
What did you all think? Am I just overly elated that Evans is gone and we’ve got a consistent panel of hosts, or do you agree that this season was just that good?