I was late but not terribly late getting around to “Top Gear,” finally bingeing on DVD screeners of the series the BBC was sending me for review about three or four years after the motoring show was rebooted around star Jeremy Clarkson.

Like many, I became addicted, devouring every episode, reveling in the many amusing challenges and epic road trips undertaken by its well-matched stars — the grumpy, reactionary jingoist “Jezzer” Clarkson, the curious, practical pedant and Renaissance Man James May and radio-polished, handy-with-a-spanner but accident-prone”Hamster,” Richard Hammond.

I was also late getting on board their Amazon replacement series “The Grand Tour,” whose promise was only fulfilled when they turned it into a literal “Grand Tour” with more epic road trips, which were, by and large, not as epic as those undertaken for the BBC.

So of course I’m a tad tardy getting around to saying goodbye to these Brit-blokes and their last “classic cars across Africa” film together, “The Grand Tour: One for the Road.”

It’s a “greatest hits” adventure, most nostalgic in the minimal clips of their old series that they were allowed to use, revisiting their younger selves in the “Top Gear” quest episode that made them, their famed 2007 “Botswana Special.”

They’d made news with their “Polar Special” earlier that year. But taking three car nuts and three ancient and breakdown-prone autos on a rideabout through Botswana, with wildlife and largely unspoiled nature and terrible roads or no roads at all, gave all three the chance to shine and made their team and their show a worldwide brand.

Seventeen years later, they go where the BBC was not allowed to go –Botswana’s neighbor Zimbabwe — for a scenic victory lap and three personal curtain calls. They remember the trek that made them and slip neatly into the characters that the two series molded around them, one last time.

The conservative, technically-inept Clarkson — now putting his sometimes brilliant, sometimes lunkheaded “outside the box” thinking on display in the delightful “I know nothing about farming” “Clarkson’s Farm” series — rejoins the ever-curious cosmopolitan, the methodical, mechanically-minded May, and the amusingly provincial, born romantic and motorcycle wrencher Hammond for one last road rally.

The idea is that they were to “buy a car you’ve always wanted” to own for this drive.

So Clarkson insists, one last time, that road rally racing champ Lancias are the “best cars” for such quests, no matter how flimsy, oddly-engineered and absurdly unreliable they are. He brings a “slightly modified” 1980 vintage Montecarlo.

Hammond shows up with an early ’70s Ford (badged as a Mercury in the States) Capri, which was “supposed to be my first car.” Hammond fell in love with his 1963 Opel Kadet in “Botswana,” naming it “Oliver” and taking it home with him. Will he be as affectionate towards “Essex,” this Capri?

And May, the third player added to complete the iconic “Top Gear” trio, the “bloke” who made his bones on the show by delivering appreciations of his costly-to-keep vintage Bentley and his lifelong love of the Triumph TR-6, arrives with the much-maligned Triumph Stag, a stylish but company-killing car infamous for the unreliable, ever-overheating engine.

As May crossed Botwana in a reliable-as-a-Swiss watch 1985 Mercedes, we’re left to wonder if “the practical one” has gone soft in the head.

The show’s famed fakery — their feigned “revolt” against longtime producer Andy Wilman — is sampled as they’re allegedly supposed to finish their TV run with an endurance race around London in new electric cars. That allows Clarkson to snipe about electric vehicles one last time, “They’re washing machines, microwave ovens,” and plot a coup where they all revisit the Southern Africa scene of perhaps their greatest triumph.

They allow themselves to get reflective over the fame and wealth that spun out of that special that made the series, and them, worldwide phenomena, and led to epic drives through South America, the U.S., Australia and almost every continent on Earth, something underscored by a world map graphic that lights up with all the places they’ve visited.

And as they make yet another “wrong turn” in a far off land, one so underfilmed as to be a wonder to behold, they do another cars-as-trains turn, as railroad tracks are smoother than washboard roads that shake old cars to pieces, and another cars-on-boats trip, this time across the crocodile-filled “largest manmade lake in the world.”

Clarkson goes jingoistic over British colonial rail construction and British dam engineering, but little is said about the unhappy British history of the country the limeys colonized as Rhodesia. The trio’s devil-may-care, “this show is ending” so “bugger off” with your complaints is a backhanded reference to all the things they said and did that finally got Clarkson kicked off “Top Gear,” with the other two following.

But as they pass imported-species pine plantations and note the vast mineral resources of the country, and drive on some perfectly-finished highways at times, they’re Amazon-circumspect in never mentioning Zimbabwe’s exploitation by and connections to China. Amazon or BBC, they still have paymasters they don’t want to upset.

Gone are the youthful pranks and many of the hijinks. Well, not the drinking. A boozy bit of boating is included. And they still resolve to leave-any-man behind whose car breaks.

A contrived bit of “smuggling” border crossing drama is no match for the international incident Clarkson created in Argentina, which if the BBC was honest, it would admit was the real reason he was sacked.

It’s a sentimental journey, to be sure, not exactly dispirited but definitely lower energy, an older men’s trek through their past at an age where you’d think the two oldest — the paunchy former (let’s hope) smoker Clarkson and the now-whitehaired May — would have at last learned to use suncreen.

But that was a big part of the charm of their chemistry. Clarkson’s inability to properly “fix” anything, May’s “Captain Slow” driving and thinking style, Hammond’s perky pluck in fixing whatever clunker he’s fallen in love with are reprised, one last time, with feeling if not with anything resembling the old gusto.

They’re admitting they’re dinosaurs, and if they’re not exactly passing the torch (the golden age of gas “motoring” is over), they know it’s time to leave. When Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman are doing what they’ve done, giving us more local flavor in their travels, different “celebrity” laughs, and doing it on (at times) electric vehicles, we’re seeing the future.

Clarkson, May and Hammond can joke about their limited futures and we can have a laugh with them over “now appearing in panto, TV’s Richard Hammond as ‘Buttons'” because we, like they, know their legend is secure, even if their fossil fuel and tire-burning days are over.

Rating: TV-MA, alcohol, profanity

Cast: Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May.

Credits: Produced by Andy Wilman, Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May. An Amazon Prime release.

Running time: 2:10