If you like travel and adventure, the most spectacular thing is probably what we did in the desert in California, all beautifully filmed to a Hollywood standard,’ says James May, beaming as he describes his lavish new motoring series, The Grand Tour. ‘Then there’s the size of Jeremy’s gut. That is pretty remarkable, when you see it.’

That’s old-school Top Gear ribbing right there, as May once again lines up next to Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond – only this time on a trip around the world with a fancy tent for a studio, playing with dream cars. Amazon Prime is reportedly paying over £160 million for 12 shows a year over three years, giving them an astronomical budget of £4.5 million per episode.

‘This is the most expensive show I have ever been involved with,’ he says. ‘By a long, long way.’

Experts have suggested The Grand Tour needs to attract fewer than a million subscribers across the world to make it worthwhile for Amazon, which is paying handsomely

May beams as he describes his new show The Grand Tour. 'If you like travel and adventure, the most spectacular thing is probably what we did in the desert in California', he says

May was livid – like many of the Top Gear team – when Clarkson ruined a good thing by getting himself sacked by the BBC for punching a producer in March 2015. The show was taken off air, May feared his career was over and wondered how on earth he was going to pay for his new Ferrari 458 Speciale – he called Clarkson ‘a tosser’ in Event a year ago.

But now May is sitting in a pub near his home in Hammersmith with a huge grin on his face, and no wonder. ‘If you’re a real car-head then the most spectacular thing you’ll see on The Grand Tour has to be the three hybrid supercars that go around the track in the first episode. We’ve been trying to get our hands on them for years.’

It’s why the launch show is called The Holy Trinity, because they finally get to drive the coveted McLaren P1, Porsche 918 Spyder and Ferrari LaFerrari together – although in typically cheeky style, the title could also be taken as a reference to the three stars of the show themselves, back together again on screen.

So did the relationship between the three change as a result of Clarkson destroying their deal with the BBC with his hot-headed thump? ‘No, I don’t think it did. I think we still dislike each other just as much as we ever did. All that stuff was long over by the time we started working on this. Our job is to wind each other up anyway. I honestly don’t think it would work without that.’

For all the high-definition visuals, spectacular scenery and cars to lust after, The Grand Tour – like the old Top Gear at its best – will be about ageing men squabbling

So did the relationship between the three change as a result of Clarkson destroying their deal with the BBC with his hot-headed thump? ‘No, I don’t think it did', May says

May is reported to be getting £7 million a year now for The Grand Tour, so presumably that new Ferrari is now paid for? ‘Yes it is, thank you.’

Then whisper this, but isn’t it time to admit that Clarkson actually did the three stars a service, by bringing their hugely popular but increasingly troubled version of Top Gear to an end?

‘Yeah,’ says May with a cautious smile, aware that the producer who got punched in a row over the lack of hot food at the end of a day’s filming spent six months off work and got £100,000 compensation from Clarkson. ‘I don’t think that was his intention but yes, the whole process may have done us a favour. We’ve had to have a rethink, which is a good thing.’

How much of a rethink? Enough to keep off the BBC’s lawyers, who will be watching to make sure this isn’t a copy. Some say the initials of The Grand Tour are suspiciously similar to ‘Top Gear Two’. All we know is that there’s no Stig testing driving cars at impossible speeds with his face hidden. ‘We don’t want one,’ says May. ‘We’ve done that.’

There’s no Star In A Reasonably Priced Car, either, no Cool Wall and they’re not based at Dunsfold Aerodrome any more. In fact, they have no HQ at all, because the lawyers thought that was too Top Gear. So instead their studio scenes are filmed under a massive canvas, based on a Baptist preacher’s tent that Clarkson saw in the series True Detective.

‘It’s got a big window on one side so you see the view of wherever we are,’ says May. ‘It flaps in the breeze. The wind picked up and sand and dust came into the tent and we had to pause for a bit while it died down. If it rains it makes a terrible racket. It has a very different feel to it, like the atmosphere of a jazz or a comedy club.’

May was livid – like many of the Top Gear team – when Clarkson (above) ruined a good thing by getting himself sacked by the BBC for punching a producer in March 2015

Top Gear was a huge hit, with 350 million viewers worldwide, but the truth is it was also becoming a parody of itself by the time the BBC sacked Clarkson.

The stunts had begun to look tired, the dodgy jokes about foreigners were increasingly causing offence and May felt it was running out of time for other reasons, too. ‘People said, “It’s gone too far away from cars.” Maybe it did, in the last series or two.’

So now they have the chance to start again with Amazon, although it took a lot of cash to entice them to make shows that will only be seen online by subscribers, at least at first. ‘You can see we have not spent it on wardrobe,’ says May, 53, looking dismissively down at his blue floral shirt.

Seven reasons you should watch the grand tour 1 The Mad Max-style opening sequence It features 2,000 extras, cost nearly £2.5 million to make, and sees a futuristic style 150-strong armada of wild custom cars kicking up dust across the Californian desert while a squadron of six military jets roars overhead. 2 The very starry guests James May won’t confirm the names of the show’s celebrity guests, but says that ‘you’ll see some very well-known faces on our show – and I’m not referring to Hammond and Clarkson.’ 3 The amazing big top tent The Grand Tour is filmed in a tent with stage, lighting rig, crane, five cameras and a solid floor. It takes eight days to put up, three days to take down and needs a crew of 114 people. The show actually has two of these ‘studio’ tents, so they can leapfrog over each other in the schedule. 4 The spectacular scenery In the first nine months the trio drive VW buggies along the beach in Namibia, join a special forces training camp in Jordan, race a Rolls-Royce across Italy and visit Germany, California, Morocco, Tennessee, Dubai, Finland, the Netherlands, South Africa and Whitby in Yorkshire. 5 The hypercar race The team hired a Portuguese racing circuit to film a race between three of the fastest cars on the planet – the £860,000 McLaren P1, the £625,000 Porsche 918 Spyder and the £1.15m Ferrari LaFerrari – something they had never managed to do on Top Gear. 6 The crazy stunts ‘The Grand Tour is not just for petrolheads,’ says May. ‘For instance, there’s a home-made car that I drive. I don’t want to tell you what it’s made of because it would spoil the whole set-up, but even I thought it was a stupid idea.’ What’s this car made of? Animal, vegetable or mineral? ‘Ooh. Erm, a bit of all those things. They’re recyclable, let’s put it that way.’ 7 The Doomsday Machine Richard Hammond attempts to build a car that would survive an apocalypse. He also attempts to save the planet with Clarkson and May by dropping wrecks of cars into the ocean to create an artificial reef off the coast of Barbados. Advertisement

Instead they have spent it on hiring fighter jets and tanks, absurdly big explosions and state-of-the-art cameras to capture stunning high-definition footage of adventures such as a race across Morocco in three superb lightweight sports cars: the Alfa Romeo 4C Spider, the Mazda MX-5 and the Zenos E10.

While they were filming in secret at exotic locations across the planet, the BBC was attempting to go on without them, with Chris Evans at the helm.

James May was watching, so what did he make of it all? ‘I don’t think it went drastically well. They should reinvent it a little more ruthlessly. There must be another way of making a car show.’

Evans stepped down in July and now Matt Le Blanc is the lead presenter. Does May believe the former Friends star and the BBC can bring Top Gear back from the dead? ‘Yes. I think they deserve to have their arses kicked if they don’t, because it must be possible. I’d like Top Gear to do well, because I’d like to be able to watch it.’

It was in 2003 that Clarkson and executive producer Andy Wilman took on a dull consumer programme about new cars and turned it into a riotous celebration of speed, spectacle and three blokes mucking about. ‘I don’t know why it worked,’ says May, whose nickname is Captain Slow. He’s the cautious one to Clarkson’s grumpy grizzly bear and the relentless cheerfulness of Richard ‘The Hamster’ Hammond. ‘We find each other irritating. I’m not sure we have that much in common. We may even be creatively fuelled by our dislike of each other. It’s more complicated than people imagine. Whatever we have together is not an easy thing to quantify, as other people have discovered, trying to imitate it.’

Top Gear was unexpectedly a massive international hit, earning the BBC £50 million a year in overseas sales and merchandise. And it was forever showing off its Britishness with Union Jacks, Spitfires, Jaguars and Mini Coopers. Surely that has to change now they are working for Amazon, an American company?

‘We have wrestled with this as in the old days we made a British television programme, with the British Broadcasting Company, about cars – and it just happened to become very famous around the world. Now we’re working for an American broadcaster but we haven’t moved to America, and we’re still crusty old British blokes. It’s also going to be watched in Germany and Japan, it will go to other places. So we have talked about this. Who are we making this show for? Should we start talking in dollars so everyone can convert it?’

Surely they haven’t abandoned the pound? ‘No. People can work all this stuff out if we use British units and even British idioms. We realised we have to carry on making the show we want to make, because that’s actually what people want to watch. As much as we try to be contemporary and modern, we’re still middle-aged British blokes. That’s just the tragic truth. Maybe that’s what people like. Maybe they pity us.’

Not everybody likes them. The French, the Germans and others have all taken offence at one time or another. Calling a Burmese man ‘a slope’ [an offensive term for Asians] was a mistake. So was driving around Argentina with the number plate H982 FKL, which livid locals took to be a bragging reference to the Falklands War. ‘I don’t think we’re xenophobic. We’re not strutting around thinking we’d like to make the world British. We’re most often rude about Britain. People tend not to notice that. Sometimes it doesn’t come across quite right and occasionally we’ve got it wrong.’

Exactly whose laws and whose regulators are they going to have to watch out for now they are only available online? ‘A lot of people think that because we’re on Amazon and we’re on the internet, we can all become foul-mouthed and swear and get drunk and vomit. But we wouldn’t do that, because it wouldn’t be very good to watch. We are being streamed in Britain so we are still governed by Ofcom, to a large extent. Most importantly, we police ourselves.’

But that’s the problem, isn’t it? Sometimes the old Top Gear didn’t police itself well enough. ‘Well, we are human. We made mistakes in performance and occasionally in editing, so they were not our best moments. But I don’t think they were... much worse things have happened in the world.’

Why sign for Amazon? Was it just for the money? ‘No, other people offered us money as well. Firstly, they wanted us to do what we’re good at, not try to and tell us how to do it. Secondly, they had quite interesting ambitions for streaming television for the new age of broadcasting.’

The audiences will be tiny compared to before, won’t they? ‘Possibly. The potential looks much smaller but we’ll never know because they won’t tell us the viewing figures.’

Let me get this straight, The Grand Tour team are never going to be told how many people are watching? ‘Apparently not, no. But I just get a feeling in my bones, which are often very accurate, that they are planning for more people than we think will be able to see this.’

Studio scenes in The Grand Tour are filmed under a massive canvas, based on a Baptist preacher’s tent that Clarkson saw in the series True Detective

That could be a hint that the rumours are right and they will sell the show on to a more mainstream channel like ITV after it has been streamed first on Amazon.

Experts have suggested The Grand Tour needs to attract fewer than a million subscribers across the world to make it worthwhile for Amazon, which is paying handsomely. What it is essentially buying is a bromance. For all their grumbling, Clarkson, Hammond and May display a lot of affection in a very coded British sort of way and make us feel part of it. They’re secretly in love, aren’t they?

‘No, God no we’re not. No. that’s a complete myth. The nature of the job means we’re together far too much of the time.’

When they are working it’s relentless, he says. ‘We’re sitting on aeroplanes together, we stay in hotels together, we have supper together, we have breakfast together, we work all day together. Huge chunks of our lives, apart from actually being in bed or in the shower or on the bog, are together. It’s enough.’

So they get grumpy. Sometimes grumpy enough to make a joke in poor taste, say the wrong thing or lash out. Most times, though, they’re just grumpy enough to be entertaining. For all the high-definition visuals, spectacular scenery and cars to lust after, The Grand Tour – like the old Top Gear at its best – will be about ageing men squabbling, as James May agrees. ‘It’s not a buddy movie, this. It’s three blokes getting on each other’s t**s.’