Their new show, titled A Massive Hunt, arrives very soon…
Ever since they parted ways with Top Gear in 2015 and began their new show The Grand Tour with Amazon Prime Video in 2016, the trio of Jeremy Clarkson, James May, and Richard Hammond and the premise of the show that binds them have barely changed.
If anything, the new platform allows them even more freedom, as The Grand Tour has allowed them to take on huge international projects, which includes their new epic, A Massive Hunt.
They find themselves with the task of travelling across Madagascar to what many believe to be the final resting place of an infamous pirate (and perhaps his long-lost buried treasure), but May tried to warn his pals that the road’s in Madagascar are infamously terrible.
We were lucky enough to catch up with them in the run-up to the release of the new special, and asked them all if this was officially the worst road they’ve ever driven on.
Kicking off with James May, since he knew what to expect, did the road live up (or down?) to expectations:
“Actually, it was worse, because my friend who told me how bad the roads were, she was talking about 25 or more years ago, and I think they’ve actually gotten worse. They were actually worse than I was expected. They were colossally bad, and I’m absolutely staggered that my little car got over some of it. Because sometimes it seemed like we were driving off some small cliffs – it was not just a bit rough, or a bit lumpy, it was just a boulder field in places. It doesn’t really deserve the term road, or even track. You’re just driving over the scenery, to be honest. But at least I did know they were going to be bad, whereas the other two just didn’t believe that.”
Next up, Richard Hammond told us it couldn’t possible be as bad as had been foretold, but…
“You do find yourself sitting there thinking ‘It is going to take me four hours to travel the length of this car’. It was astonishing, and I think partly that is because of the nature of the topography is such that it is going to be that shape, but it is a heavily trafficked road. What we were on at one point was the Route National, it was the main road. So there was a lot of people travelling over it. But it was hellish, I was staggered. And we were a little bit arrogant, thinking ‘Oh come on, we’ve driven across the Magillicudy Salt Flats’, we’ve driven everywhere. We thought. But we’d never seen anything like it.”
And finally, Jeremy Clarkson confirms, officially, that it is the single worst road in the world. It is not even a matter of opinion, but it is a fact:
“I have racked my brains, because I knew I was going to be asked about it. And using superlatives, and I know I use them all the time, but I think it is the Guinness Book of World Records that it is officially the worst road in the world. It is spectacular – it is not a road, it is just a piece of ground where there are no trees. It’s a dried up river bed, except it isn’t. The French did that, they said ‘There you are, look at the gift we’ve given you people of Madagascar’, so I’m not surprised they threw the French out.”
The Grand Tour: A Massive Hunt will be available to watch on Amazon Prime Video from Friday, December 18, and you can check out the trailer for the special right here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZmoFfYCzKw&feature=youtu.be
These interviews have been edited slightly for clarity.
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