The second episode of the second season of “The Grand Tour” made its way through the internet to Amazon Prime today, subtitled “The Fall Guys”, where James stands in a park and Richard is touched by a man.
The main segment is one of the boys’ usual race challenges from location A to location B. In this case, it was Jeremy Clarkson in a 2018 Ford GT against James May and a temporarily disabled [due to his crash of the Rimac Concept One supercar in the first episode] Richard Hammond using public transportation to get from New York City to Niagara Falls. Clarkson notes that the 2018 version of the GT is an improvement over the previous version because “you can get inside even if you have a head” but, alas, the ride is “stiffer than Ron Jeremy”.
While Clarkson will be driving the 2018 Ford GT directly from New York City to Niagara Falls, the temporarily disabled Hammond and May will use an AirTrain to the JFK airport, where they will fly JetBlue to Buffalo and board two buses that will take them to Niagara Falls. However, along the way, Clarkson calls JetBlue and reassigns their seats from the front of the plane to the rear of the plane and makes a request to not serve them alcohol.
Conversation Street was a rather weak entry this week as the only memorable snippet of information was the fact that Formula One’s Abu Dhabi Grand Prix serves rosewater on the podium instead of champagne and Clarkson reckons Kimi Raikkonen intentionally finished fourth for that reason.
Clarkson then goes on to road test the 2018 AMG Mercedes GTR in a spectacular lime green color but the test and the commentary are mostly tepid before handing it off to The Grand Tour’s new test driver – drum roll, please – Abbie Eaton. Who? Eaton is a British racer and underwhelming choice [when presented with the possibilities of Nico Rosberg or Mark Webber] as the new female version of The Stig.
Celebrity F[ace]-Off was another less-than-sparkling match-up between South African cricket-playing person Kevin Pietersen and former baseball-playing person-and-not-ex-Beach-Boy Brian Wilson.
Clarkson – not too surprisingly, given the overly scripted structure of the challenge – wins the race segment in the 2018 Ford GT but the overall quality of the episode is a notch, or two, down from the season opener last week and ASN awards a good, but not great, 82 out of 100.
