None taken and actually I'm glad you said it.

It causes me to have a good think about why they work for me, both as the Grand Tour trio and in their individual pursuits, and why both Top Gear and Grand Tour Mk1 did as well, when other shows that focussed on technical content leave me bored and the likes of Velocity/Motortrend actually repel me.

"My name is Sarge and I'm a petrolhead." That might or might not explain what I'm not interested in and what I am interested in.

I'm not very interested in specs and reviews; call it "content". That puts me at odds with the technical content style car-magazine shows (and the magazines themselves). I can look up prices and feel no need to be able to memorise 0-60 times and horsepower vs. torque figures. Oddly, that stuff bores me as much as the lack thereof disappoints so many others.

I'm not a collector, so valuations and polish don't interest me in the slightest. Amassing and possessing them to me is akin to collecting plates or some range of plushies. Terms like jackdaw, male costume jewellery, harem, portfolio, compensation come to mind. Jay Leno's world is not at all interesting to me. I have no interest in possessing American muscle, Porsches, Ferrari, or an E-type.

I'm not at all a social creature. Swapping rubber ducks with other Jeep owners is an infantile practice, a club cruise to a winery is something my wife and I can do in the beloved ratbag Sub'y without having to pretend I like someone because they have the same classic car I do. Indeed, the entire classic car scene leaves me at best amused and more often revolted, be it sitting out in the noonday sun in a folding chair in a field full of Corvettes or going to the club Christmas party. Don't get me wrong, I'll go to a car show as a tourist, spend an hour looking at the cars, then go to the pub but sit out there all day? whoopee...

Modern cars are no less fascinating as objects. Technology levels make them throwaway rather than maintainable, yet the expense makes them so very painful to throw away. I couldn't care less about "infotainment" systems, modes and menus, or technical masturbation in the manner of, oh, BMW. A perfect example is the paddle gear-box. No-one yet has addressed the basic issue that the paddles are out of play in a street-corner as soon as you turn the wheel hand over hand. Try parallel-parking a car with a flappy-paddle gearbox on a slope. I could not be at all interested in a treatise about the technological marvels included in the latest BMW M-series, nor the shift speed of a double-clutch paddle-box in an AMG Merc.

So, what am I interested in that makes me a petrolhead? It's the drive. None of the above have any positive effect on the drive, not a little dirt, the odd dent, Apple Carplay, none of it. Indeed, a lot of the above take away from the drive, be it touchscreens, traction-control systems, cameras and proximity sensors in lieu of real visibility and situational awareness. The distraction of a hundred different useless parameters on display in garish splendour across the dashboard and on the bigger-is-better touchscreens. I've never even turned the radio on in my current daily, which illustrates how off the mainstream my petrolheadedness is compared to the Velocity/Leno/Hagerty-Valuation crowd. Even this basic observation sums it up; I don't want connectivity to the world into the car via my dam phone, I want the connectivity of me and the car via my senses as an escape from the world.

I'll share that world but with a very select and small group, starting with my wife and an afternoon's drive in an MGB. I have a few friends who share the love of turning a spanner effectively rather than collecting tools. The largest group, a group I've already aged out of I'm afraid, were at the track or rally course. Nothing outs the fakers, posers, and cheque-book enthusiasts (and their snob wives, another subject entirely! GRIN!) quite like a good racetrack or rally course. Give me a tight, lightly and properly modified, and well-maintained Spit any day by myself on a twisty back road through the ridges before trying to interest me in the specs of the latest supercar or a field of Mopar restos with the sun setting on a backdrop of trailers.

My favourite cars aren't the warhorses everyone knows. An E-type is a vile drive at the limit, and curves are the bane of the 60s muscle car, all Mustangs, and most Corvettes. Cars to be seen in are rarely good drives, whether classic or modern. I had a Jaguar XJ8, one of the exec saloons that sold as a Daimler in the UK, and it was not only a lovely place to be but handled like a police interceptor. I love that car to this day. It had sat for a couple years and I had to "wake it up" which was an ill-timed expensive exercise as the electrics were more complicated than I could handle myself, so I reluctantly let it go. I adored that car, though, a great drive.

Most modern sportscars really are only fun on the track if they are fun at all. By the time you get to that bandwidth in a car where you can actually play, where a well-sorted car can be induced to oversteer or understeer at will, very often you are already going far too fast on the road. A 911 or a Lotus Elise only gets into the zone at twice the speed limit or so, where something like a Midget or an Alfa Spider gets there without the anti-social speeds. There is a saying that its more fun to drive a slow car fast than a fast car slow, and its true so long as that slow car is still properly taut and responds to driver inputs crisply and predictably. A wallowing pig, fast or slow, is never fun. Rather than the new stuff, the exotica, or the gentleman's essentials, a simple tight car, very light, manual gearbox, torque at the bottom, much more my desire. Better drives, not better specs.

So, having now circled back in a big sloppy loop, now, why do I like these guys, then? They don't take this or themselves seriously. They aren't collectors, they aren't tech-geeks or spec-geeks. Bear in mind I usually don't follow car stuff on Youtube because, yes, it is either all "content" (which personally is boring), that or trying to be in-my-face stupid and annoying. Admittedly, I backed into these guys from the reboot Grand Tour, so already "selected" for me. The three of them work for me, just as Harris, Flintoff, and McGuiness worked, May, Clarkson and Hammond worked, while Evans, LeBlanc, and the rest of the dogs breakfast between were worse than awful. Francois, Michael, and James on Grand Tour work for me. I'd much rather see someone look up from the driver's seat and see an eagle soaring whilst traversing a canyon than regale me with the difference in performance figures between an SLK and an AMG. The drive, not the car? I don't even remember what Clarkson, May, and Hammond drove in the Middle East Special, but it was a great journey and a lot of irreverent fun.

It's doing me good to write this, being in a bit of an existential crisis whilst coming to terms with my longevity (not my mortality, but my longevity). I'm to a point where I can't work on cars anymore, something I have to accept but not something I expected to live long enough to face. Its a significant part of my life with cars, or indeed with machines, and spelling out why they are an extension of self rather than a thing onto themselves is part of my figuring out what I'll do next.