grand tour boat race

The Grand Tour Hosts Are Racing Boats Through Cambodia and Vietnam in a New Special

This looks like one really watery adventure.

The Grand Tour , as we know it, is a car show. Its hosts, Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May, do and talk about things that are usually, in one way or another, related to cars. The show's latest special takes things in a different direction.

The Grand Tour revealed its first trailer for a new one-off feature-length special coming this holiday season, and it's all about boats. Racing boats through Vietnam and Cambodia , to be specific.

That's right, this time around the British trio are challenging themselves to navigate Mekong Delta, a series of complex rivers, peninsulas, islands, and streams that snake throughout southern Vietnam, to see who can reach the other side the quickest.

The trailer gives us a good look at what sort of boat each of the hosts have chosen, and they're ask wacky as you'd expect. Clarkson shows up with a military-like service boat meant for police duty. May went for an older wooden boat that looks like it would be more suited to Lake Como than a Vietnam river. Hammond went for a full-on speed boat, complete with some extremely Nineties graphics.

As with any of The Grand Tour's specials, there are plenty of hilarious antics, close calls, and clever pranks in store. The full special will be available to Amazon Prime members on, December 13, 2019.

Brian Silvestro was Hearst Autos' former lead deputy editor for rankings content. He spent over seven years as a staff writer for Road & Track Magazine where he contributed car reviews, industry interviews, and more. He has a taste for high-mileage, rusted-out projects and amateur endurance racing.

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The Grand Tour Seamen: Amazon Prime release date, filming locations and everything else about season 4 special

The grand tour hosts are headed off on a epic boat race, with disastrous results.

The three petrol heads of The Grand Tour are back for another adventure – but this time they’re swapping wheels for hulls, as they’re going nautical.

Excusing the terrible teenage joke name, The Grand Tour Presents: Seamen will air on Amazon Prime in December.

Alongside some awful puns and some water-based capers – here’s what to expect from the one-off special show:

When is it on TV?

The Grand Tour Presents: Seamen  will be available on  Amazon Prime on Friday 13 December.

What’s the big idea?

Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond are making an epic journey by water, travelling 500 miles the Mekong delta from Siem Reap in Cambodia to Vung Tau in Vietnam  for the latest Grand Tour outing.

Clarkson drives a recreation of a Vietnam war-era PBR (Patrol Boat River), Hammond is on a speedboat, and May commandeers a wooden 1939 river cruiser.

May said: “I thought it would be very tranquil and like a lovely boating holiday but it didn’t work out like that at all. It was utter misery.”

Read more James May: Our Man In Japan – ‘My travel programme isn’t a serious investigation, it’s a bit of a lark’

What happened during the filming?

It turned out it was slightly treacherous. They get stuck in storms, there’s a few bumps and scrapes and, surprisingly, they come face to face with the effects of climate change.

Clarkson recently surprised the public by recognising the climate crisis, after being stranded during the 500 mile boat race. The three hosts ended up having to wade through the Mekong river system, which has suffered from droughts. He told the  Sunday Times it was “a graphic demonstration” of global warming that he found “genuinely alarming”.

May was there to witness it too and told i : “Well I was never quite such as denier as Jeremy was. But it was quite shocking to see it close up. It was a little bit more complicated than just climate change, there were also issues of the rainy season hadn’t started yet, the locals were telling us this is really odd.”

Did they discuss the problem further between themselves? “We did talk about the issue, mainly about getting stuck, because the big lake that we thought we would go charging across in our boats, we sort of limped across it constantly hitting the bottom. It should have been eight times the area it was.”

Also, Hammond contracted the bacterial skin infection cellulitis while filming on the boats.

“It bloody hurts,” he explained earlier this month. “I got it from climbing into the water and then I realised my legs were hurting. My feet were very red and it went through my legs […] the other two took the piss non-stop.”

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The Grand Tour Is Coming Back With A Boat Special (And No Studio)

Last December, we reported that Clarkson, Hammond and May would be giving their Amazon Prime vehicle The Grand Tour a bit of a facelift, scrapping the studio segments and putting the focus on longer travel films. A year later, the three have made good on their promise with a trip through the Mekong Delta.

They call their new special ‘Seamen’ because the trio makes its way from stunt to stunt by boat in this one. And also for the other reason which becomes immediately clear in the trailer. I don’t know what else I expected.

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Judging by the trailer, it looks like there’ll be collisions, yelling, condescending pantomiming at locals, and all of the other things we’ve come to expect from one of these travel films. And we’ll watch it. They knew we would.

I suppose they’ve done the research and know that the travel specials are the big draw these days. It makes sense. They’re what bring in viewers who don’t know a Mercury from a Mercedes and frankly don’t want to know and that’s going to be the focus. And they should. They have the best job in the world and seem to still have fun doing it. And there are people out there who enjoy it too.

I guess I shouldn’t be too sour about where The Grand Tour is right now. There have always been duds, even back in the Top Gear days, but there also have been really impressive films, like the Lancia film from last year. If they can crank out any more of those, I’m in.

In any case, the special drops on Friday, December 13th on Amazon Prime.

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After Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May moved on from Top Gear , everyone wondered what their next adventure would take them. Happily,  The Grand Tour was soon announced by Amazon and was very similar to Top Gear in many ways. The main difference was the size of the budget given to the trio to spend per episode.

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Thanks to this large amount of money, Clarkson, Hammond, and May were able to produce more exciting and bigger scale episodes than they had ever done before. This resulted in special episodes becoming more and more frequent. Indeed, the fourth season of The Grand Tour will consist only of specials. To celebrate this, we've ranked all of the specials so far.

Operation Desert Stumble (Season 1, Episode 2)

In Season 1, viewers were still trying to adjust to the show's format. The first episode put their fears at ease (mostly) but the second episode had the unenviable task of introducing the traditional 'challenges' in a new light. Although it's not technically a special, "Operation Desert Stumble" was the show's first attempt at showing Clarkson, Hammond, and May outside of the tent being totally stupid.

Unfortunately, while a bit entertaining, the episode fell a bit flat. The series was trying too hard to be something different and resulted in the entire challenge feeling forced. The trio had to rescue hostages and take them to the embassy while fighting off insurgents. There was a distinct lack of vehicles present and even the banter felt wooden.

Sea To Unsalty Sea (Season 3, Episode 11)

The Grand Tour special episodes are known for their creativity, and also their hilarity, as they often involve the presenters using old cars or general vehicles and placing them well outside of their comfort zone. However, in this special, Clarkson, Hammond and May broke away from that formula and bought 3 grand touring cars for a drive from Georgia to Azerbaijan.

Since there were no real perilous obstacles for the trio to face, the whole episode felt a bit tame compared to their other adventures. There were still a couple of highlights, such as May breaking Stalin's cupboard and the 'real world race' but other than that, the episode just felt a bit dull. However, the stars of the show were, of course, the cars, which looked absolutely amazing.

International Buffoon's Vacation (Season 3, Episode 8)

This special was miles better than the previous entry but unfortunately, this space still had to be filled. Basically, Clarkson, Hammond, and May were told to go on holiday in the United States in RVs. Not willing to share, they each branched off and bought their own and modified them to their liking. May made his RV into a pub, Clarkson transformed his RV into a toilet/speedboat hybrid and Hammond bought a van and made it worse.

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It's always fun to watch the presenters create obstacles for themselves, and there were a lot of things that went wrong in this special, which was a very good thing. However, the one constant thread that ruined an otherwise great Grand Tour special was the weird thing with Jeremy and the show's ex-racing driver, the American. It just felt incredibly forced and detracted from the episode's sense of fun.

Feed The World (Season 2, Episode 11)

Season 2 of The Grand Tour suffered a lot of incidents behind the scenes. Firstly, there was Hammond's near-fatal car crash, which he miraculously survived almost unscathed. Then Clarkson fell ill for a while and so as a result, Season 2 had a shortened episode count (although 11 episodes are still fairly impressive).

One of the drawbacks of this season, however, was that it only featured one special. To be fair, Season 1 had one special as well, but it took up two episodes. "Feed The World" was a sort of mini special but despite that, it was surprisingly good. Tasked with transporting fish, the boys still regained their childish sense of humor and the special was all the better for it.

Colombia Special (Season 3, Episodes 2 & 3)

This was the first special of Season 3 and it really set the stage for what was to come. It was a traditional special in every sense of the word as Clarkson, Hammond, and May were given the simple task of becoming wildlife photographers. The trio was in top form as they made constant jokes about Colombia's certain trading export, as well as being totally useless at actually taking photographs.

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There were loads of great moments in these couple of episodes, such as Clarkson's encounter with a group of people who really liked donkeys and the trio's attempts at photographing the animals. There were also some highly dangerous obstacles, such as rackety old bridges and the king of all hailstorms. The only drawback of this special was that it started out fairly slow and didn't truly pick up the pace until the second act.

The Grand Tour Presents: Seamen (Season 4, Episode 1)

The most recent special on this list, "Seamen" was a welcome return to The Grand Tour , after the show had been off-air for almost a year. Currently, in its fourth season, the series decided to try something new with this special and so it ditched the car element in favor of boats. This idea was risky but they managed to pull it off. It helped as well that the specials had been less about the vehicles in recent years.

Clarkson, Hammond, and May were given the challenge of journeying across Cambodia and Vietnam by boat. Cue lots of swearing, jokes and basic faffing about. It was incredibly entertaining to watch, as the lads clearly had no control over their boats. Even Clarkson, who was the only one who remained enthusiastic about the challenge struggled to keep his boat under control. It made for a truly great episode.

The Beach (Buggy) Boys (Season 1, Episodes 7 & 8)

Season 1 of The Grand Tour was a fairly shaky start to the show. The main issue was that it was a car show fronted by Clarkson, Hammond, and May, yet it somehow had to be different from Top Gear . In this season, the show overdid it with the differences. There were some entertaining bits but a lot of the messing around felt forced.

The best episodes of the season by far were the two episodes dedicated to the Namibia special. This was the lads doing what they do best, and in this case, their best was racing beach buggies across a desert. Their banter was in top form, the scenery was amazing and there were some genuinely heart-stopping moments. This was exactly what you want from a Grand Tour special.

Survival Of The Fattest (Season 3, Episode 13)

This was an amazing episode. It had all the usual features that make a special, spectacular, but it had a unique twist that no one saw coming. Often, the presenters go ahead and buy a vehicle and modify it for their upcoming adventure, but here, they actually built their own car from scratch.

Once they had actually built their car, Clarkson, Hammond, and May still kept the laughs coming. From christening their car 'John', and watching it hop up hills, to Clarkson and May refusing to let Hammond drive due to his reckless history, this special literally could do no wrong. The fact that all three had to travel in the same car meant that there was a camaraderie present that we hadn't seen before either.

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Jeremy, Richard and James embark on an adventure across the globe, driving new and exciting automobiles from manufacturers all over the world. Jeremy, Richard and James embark on an adventure across the globe, driving new and exciting automobiles from manufacturers all over the world. Jeremy, Richard and James embark on an adventure across the globe, driving new and exciting automobiles from manufacturers all over the world.

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The Boats Behind The Grand Tour Presents: Seamen

While many of you aren’t interested in The Grand Tour leaving the car keys on the coffee table and instead looking towards boats, we can’t wait for Seamen to air this coming Friday 13 December. But while we’ve gone into great detail about what we’re expecting, we haven’t touched properly on the boats they’re sailing in this episode.

Jeremy Clarkson’s PBR (Patrol Boat, Riverine)

Used during the Vietnam War, this patrol boat is used for basic river patrol thanks to its low-draft and high speed. Clarkson explains to Hammond how it is powered by two V8 engines, both produces 350hp each. You can see a similar boat being used in the Hollywood motion picture, Apocalypse Now. This boat was apparently built specially for the show.

Richard Hammond’s Scarab

This high-performance power boat produces a total of 850hp from two V8 engines. According to Reddit , a similar Scarab with similar power will reach a top speed of around 60mph and run faster in choppy waters compared to still lakes and rivers. It’s usually found in the waterways of Miami where they’re used as tools for boasting.

James May’s 1939 Wooden River Cruiser

While we can’t find much information about this boat, but after a Google, they’re often described as antiques, and offer very little power compared to Clarkson and Hammond’s choices for this episode. Only offering one engine in most models, it is slow, but similar classic boats were sometimes used to pull water skiers in the official European water-ski championships.

So yes, while we have no cars in this episode, we have the trio sodding about and being funny as usual, and surely that’s something we can’t say no to? Episode 2 will bring back the cars, however. You can read about that here. 

Alex Harrington

James may doesn't agree with jeremy clarkson over greta thunberg "mad and dangerous", factory five f9r is all kinds of aggressive with a 750hp 9.5-litre v12, related articles, roborace are attempting an autonomous hill climb run.

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