THE Grand Tour's boss has revealed the 'brutal' fallout from James May's horror crash – and what it means for the future of the show.
Fans of the Amazon Prime Video series will soon get to watch the new special, The Grand Tour Presents: A Scandi Flick.
It sees presenters James, Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond driving rally cars across remote areas of Norway in extreme winter conditions.
However, one of the first challenges sees James, 59, slam his rally car – a Mitsubishi Lancer Evo 8 – into a wall and require hospital treatment.
The show's Executive Producer Andy Wilman – who previously produced Top Gear when the trio were its presenters – has revealed what happened in the moment after the accident and how it impacted the show so early on in the production.
He told The Sun Online: "James, after the crash, he had pain, we thought 'alright, he must have done some ribs or something'.
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"And he was talking OK so then it's [thinking about] concussion but then there's nothing you can do until you've done the scan on that, so we figured we might be out by a day.
"At that point, with Richard and Jeremy, they'll carry on filming and James can rejoin, whether it's one day or two days, as it happens it ended up being a day and a night.
"We just adapt that, it sounds brutal, there's an accident we're still filming, we can't sit around his bed giving him grapes, we've got to move on, if he's fine."
Andy added that the bigger issue was the car James had chosen, as it was badly damaged on impact and the team "didn't know if it would run again", which would be a big let down with so much of the show still to shoot.
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He said: "That was so badly banged up, it was in the garage and the mechanic went 'this car is a complete write off', so I had to give him a bit of a Winston Churchill speech about getting things going again and mended, which they did."
Despite James' injuries, Andy insists that everyone involves is always aware that there's an element of risk to the show, and so it won't make them change anything for future episodes.
He explained: "Long term do we think about changing things? No we don't because we go along knowing there's risk, and then it's just about mitigating it.
"So we won't look at this film and then go, 'right this is telling us something', we just wouldn't do that."
The Grand Tour Presents: A Scandi Flick premieres on Amazon Prime Video on September 16 2022.
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