I'm rather late to the party on this, but I haven't had prime for a while and have been doing a full rewatch of Top Gear and Grand Tour in lockdown.
The Fiat review was good, and the studio segments were among the best of those in the first series.
The Maserati film was not very good though imo. It had some nice moments of camaraderie, but it had multiple fatal flaws.
Firstly, multiple rehashed jokes, "oh no we've all bought the same car," "oh no we're stuck in narrow city streets" "oh no the car I was towing/carrying fell off and I didn't notice," Hammond speaks bad French, and even a failed jump to get on a boat in northern France.
Then there's the directing. It was obvious of course that the alternative routes, going "as the crow flies" and driving through shipping containers, were completely staged. Jeremy and Richard rejoining as well. I had some hope that James was going to have an actual clever plan to win of some kind, so the crash at the end was a let-down. In the city, it was strange how they were all separated and then did a probably-scripted cars meeting and one having to back up thing. On the track, Jeremy's crash into the gravel trap is poorly directed as well. He supposedly goes off on the exit to a wide corner with Hammond in front of him, then crashes into gravel in the middle of a tight turn with no Hammond in sight. They may not have had any good footage of the actual off, but why did they not even bother to do a proper setup to recreate it? It's so lazy.
None of these are as big a deal however as the main flaw of the film, the insincerity of it. We've seen on a previous Top Gear episode that Jeremy hated the Biturbo so much he bought one just to destroy it, and now he's so in love with the nearly identical one he's bought for this that he's desperate to win so he won't have to sell it? At the beginning of the segment, they make fun of all the cars being the same because of how cash-strapped Maserati was in the 80s. Jeremy then makes a reference to the great 250F before throwing his car into a corner and discovering that the handling is a total mess. He also mentions the cool wind-based names Maseratis had in the 70s, in stark contrast to the 430 and and the Biturbo. They then say they were going to go to the South of France but decide to stay in the North so they don't have to drive their cars for any longer. I kept waiting for the part where they reveal their cars are awful and they hate them. When they did the "I love my car so much I don't want to sell it" scene, I thought it was a setup for a gag where they all got in their cars, admitted they hated them, and then tried to lose the race so they could sell them or just crash them. That would have been somewhat original, but they didn't do it. Their love for their cars was so clearly faked. They displayed no real passion for them at any point. I guess they felt the final race needed the emotional component for tension, but it just wasn't there. That lack of passion/lack of honesty about their cars made the whole segment feel totally hollow, and it just made me doubt everything, even May's fractured arm. I guess they felt the final race needed the emotional component for tension, but it just wasn't there. That combined with how clearly staged that race was made the finale so boring. This was just one of the dullest and least-inspired segments of TG/GT ever. It didn't even have good scenery.
I watched this once when it came out. I know I did because I remembered some of the in-studio jokes and the Fiat review, but I legitimately had no memory of the Maserati segment. It was completely gone from my mind.
5/10 for a decent review of the Fiat, some good studio moments, and a couple smiles during the Maserati film, like Jeremy listening to his radio and affectionately laughing at the other two as Hammond was directing May.
