The boys – Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, James May – return for the fifth season of “The Grand Tour” with “The Scandi Flick” [a reference to an earlier “Top Gear” episode featuring Finnish rally car drivers] on Amazon Prime and it mostly delivers everything that “The Grand Tour/Top Gear” fans would like to see from the boys.
There are an unending river of insults, some pranks and, of course, inappropriate races and usages of the vehicles they are featuring – in this case, genuine Mitsubishi and Subaru rally cars with an Audi RS4 tossed into the mix that Jeremy turns into a rally car.
The location is all of the major Scandinavian countries who have territories above the Arctic Circle [sorry, Denmark and Iceland] where the boys have assembled with their rally car of choice – Richard – Subaru; James – Mitsubishi and Jeremy – Audi [though not the untouchable S1 or Pikes Peak Quattros of yore, but rather the more pedestrian RS4, as it has the proper bloodline – though we can all feel relieved that Jeremy did not pick the Lancia].
What ensues, of course, is a fairly typical “Top Gear/The Grand Tour” episode where the boys engage in all manner of competitions that fans have grown to know and love over the years. Everybody will have their favorite, naturally, but at the top of the AutoSportsNation list is towing specially-constructed Scandinavian “caravans” behind their rally cars – probably one of the most inappropriate usages of a rally car that can be imagined – but one which clearly involved the most fun for the trio.
All in all, being a mostly typical episode of one or both of the shows, it had its pros and cons. The pros have a long list – the pranks, the races, the challenges and the witty back-and-forth repartee that could only emanate from the mouths of good friends. The cons are a much shorter list – consisting only of the more obvious of the scripted ploys and the inclusion of Clarkson’s politicized remarks, which seemed out of place in the otherwise fun episode of friends fooling around as well as unnecessary if there were no similar remarks coming from Hammond and May to balance the sheet.
With that, ASN awards a solid 90 out of 100 to “The Grand Tour – A Scandi Flick” with hopes that another episode is not too far behind.
