Jeremy Clarkson wasn’t keen on the original plans for the ending of The Grand Tour (Image: Prime Video)
was brutally honest in his views of the original planned ending for . Earlier this month, Jeremy reunited with and as .
The trio embarked on one final road trip across Zimbabwe before heading to Kubu Island in Botswana. as their journey wrapped up on the same island where their first Top Gear special took place 17 years earlier.
Instead of an elaborate final goodbye, the series ended with the three stars simply shaking hands. However, One for the Road’s final moments almost looked very different.
Initial plans for the finale had the trio travelling to the USA to film the last episode. However, it turned out the team weren’t keen on the potential complications that were likely to arise from attempting to accomplish this.
Richard Porter, The Grand Tour script editor, shared more about the original ending in a recent podcast appearance, including Jeremy’s rebuttal of the planned scenes.
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The trio embarked on one final road trip across Zimbabwe (Image: Prime Video)
“That last show wasn’t going to be what it turned out to be,” he said on a recent episode of . “Originally it was gonna be something else and we spent a lot of time arguing about what it was going to be.”
He continued: “The original thing was gonna be a sort of, ‘Goodbye to the internal combustion engine’, we were gonna go to America – I think I can say this now because it’s all over so I’m not giving anything away…
“We were gonna do this massive farewell to the engine. Go to the US, buy some real mega-mileage cars, and do a little bit of a road trip more like that French special we did. The hero cars would be used to go between interesting places to do stuff with interesting cars and do this farewell to the engine.”
However, he revealed the team “tied themselves in knots with it” when it came to working out the details.
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The finale of The Grand Tour almost looked very different (Image: Prime Video)
Porter explained: “It was also James May going, ‘Well, technically the internal combustion engine is still going to be around for a long time after we’re all dead’, and we were like, ‘Well, yeah that’s true, James, but you won’t be able to buy a brand new one in this country within our lifetime’.”
Opening up on the moment they decided to axe the plans all together, Porter said: “So yeah, the last Grand Tour was gonna be this big American salute to the engine and they had this, kind of, grand plan.
“One of our producer’s grand plans was to do this final shot of all these amazing cars coming across the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and they’d all stop. I mean, whether we could get that bridge closed… no one had really looked into this, we assumed that maybe with the right amount of money, we could.
“So they’d all come to a stop on this bridge and the drone shot would just go up and up and up and up forever.” Sharing Jeremy’s damning verdict, he added: “But we just started to tie ourselves in knots and it was Jeremy who went, ‘Let’s not do that at all then’. There were a lot of meetings.”