The Grand Tour, just like Top Gear, is about 30% talk, 40% boring stuff and 30% hot cars you can't afford. We don't know much about the hotly anticipated Season 3, but we've just caught a scoop about a major super-GT shootout.
Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May are testing three exciting cars, two of which are so new that only a few people have reviewed them. We're talking about the new Bentley Continental GT, the M850i version of the 8 Series and the Aston Martin DBS Superleggera.
These are all 2018 debuts with powerful engines that fill a specific niche: traveling large distances in comfort, at high speed, but also with a touch of excitement. We're not 100% sure who is in which car, but it seems that James May is driving the blue Bentley, Clarkson the overpowered white Aston Martin and Richard is in the burnt orange German coupe.
Let's look at a few specs, so we understand how they stack up. The DBS is a monster equipped with a re-tuned version of Aston's first twin-turbo V12, a 5.2-liter making 725 HP 663lb-ft (900Nm) of peak torque, giving it a 0-62mph time (100km/h) of 3.4 seconds and a top speed of 211mph (339km/h).
The Conti GT III was the first to come out by a few months and is equipped with a brand new W12. The AWD traction monster has 635 HP and will get to 62 mph in 3.7 seconds, even though it weighs over 2.2 tons.
Meanwhile, the BMW M850i is the top version of the new 8 Series that replaces the 6 Series. It's supposed to be the cheapest car here, probably by a factor of two, and packs a 4.4-liter twin-turbo V8 with 530 HP. It too has AWD and in this company could be considered light at 1,890 kilograms. The standard sprint time is supposed to be the same as the Bentley. Hopefully, this is one of the things they tried in Georgia (the country, not the U.S. state).
Mihnea's favorite cars have already been built, the so-called modern classics from the '80s and '90s. He also loves local car culture from all over the world, so don't be surprised to see him getting excited about weird Japanese imports, low-rider VWs out of Germany, replicas from Russia or LS swaps down in Florida. Full profile
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