I finally got to watch it... and I was highly, highly impressed.
I haven't been on the Top Gear / TGT train for as long (damn oceans) as some people but I saw my first episode (Ronny Wood/The Peel P50) on BBC America, and I was absolutely floored. I had to have it. Everything they've ever done.
And so the hunt went. If it was on BBC America in my basement, I watched. If not, I had a media player going through every episode, every season on one monitor or TV while I played video games, did homework or did anything in my room/house. Those three were my company in my house for the first year before I started to know people when I moved. Then they were my company again for another year when I moved again and had to make new friends. They came with me to Australia, and joined me there again (where I paid a ridiculous amount to 'rent' a PC at an internet cafe to download and convert the "vietnam" series into PSP playable format). I drove in a shitty little van around the entire Australian continent, watching them rag on about Communistical cars, and drive out of landing craft in a small Ford hatchback because it's all I had when it was a night after driving and there was nobody around. There was something so special about watching them ride motorbikes in Vietnam while in the literal middle of the outback, in the back of a van, nobody else around for miles. It was also kinda dangerous in hindsight, as if I'd been bit or something I would have been definitely "quite dead". But they were there, touring Australia with me.
I realize very few people are going to see this, "and I don't care if they don't read it", but Top Gear and The Grand Tour - So May, Hammond and Clarkson, and the shows' crew members over the years - have had an extremely positive effect on my life.
This show gets an 11. My extended family are all English northerners, and so I understood the company car thing. Even without the real personal attachment to the cars, watching that was exactly perfect. It's a shame that they're ending the tent now, I really think they've rounded into good form this last season. I hope there's a possibility it comes back. Or even if it's a one-on-one-off seasonal thing. I'm going to miss it, it's really been the one show I've looked forward to every week, year for ages. I'm not giving it the rating because 'its the end' - I was giving it Top Marks when the doc shows were done. It was the best episode of The Grand Tour in my opinion. This or the Jim Clark show. But I mildly digress.
End of an era. I was reading through the replies mildly mocking the "oh they're not seriously tearing up... are they?" posts ... then I started to write this ..uhh... essay and found moments when my eyesight was getting a little cloudy too. Reminiscing about the adventures they've been on, the adventures I've been on while carting them around on a laptop or a PSP, leaving it on in an otherwise silent empty house just to get some warmth into the place. Watching James get egg on his face because his BL hydrogas suspension wasn't quite up to the task.
If anybody from the cast or crew see this, please accept my most sincere thanks for what you have all done over the years. It can't have been easy putting together such a show, week after week and year after year for 20 years. You have enriched lives by bringing escapeism and joy. At the very least, I can guarantee you've enriched one life... "That man over there" - Me.