Postcards from the Isle of Man: Attention Paddock
A week in the awning surrounded by engine bits.
This is my first foray into writing a newsletter on my phone, so if you notice any typos, please don’t tell me.
This past week has been seven long days of practice sessions, qualifying sessions, bike fixing, and a couple of races. The first Superbike and Supersport races roared over the island at the weekend, and after nights of hearing bikes screaming on the dyno I finally got to watch them take flight from the Grandstand and down Bray Hill.
Usually I watch from the hedges, but we’ve been busy in the paddock all week so I’ve become a regular at Trackside, the fan park bar. I’ve never really spent much time there in previous years—it’s a great place for a pint while the racers cross the finish line, but I’ve tended to use it as a pre-drinks place until now. This year, I’m on my own a lot while Tom and the rest of the team fettle and clean and do complicated-sounding data analysis, so having somewhere to be right in the thick of it when I haven’t got time to travel to Hillberry or Ballagary or Ramsey has been a super bonus find. The screens show the live coverage, you’re right beside the track—as the name would suggest—so you can hear the bikes roaring out of the pits, there’s a wine bar run by local wine shop Vino, and it feels totally safe. I get a burger and a beer, sit down on the grass in front of the big screens and the stage (yep, there’s a stage) and live my version of a festival lifestyle. It’s ideal. It’s heaven.
Inside the beer tent it’s a different vibe, and I’ve decided I love it. At the back of the park the queue for beer is long, but it goes fast, and while you wait you can watch the race coverage and overhear race gossip and outlandish claims about tenuous links to racers, the gear they’re using, and who’s going to win. Stand inside the tent to watch the screens and you’re transported to a European sports bar, you know the type, where everyone is raising their plastic cups and cheering one minute, and shouting mean expletives the next. Groups of men in matching shirts buy Carling in rounds, and get increasingly demonstrative with each other, arms around shoulders, laughs getting louder. It’s been sunny and we’re all a little red, excited to be brought together watching a sport we all love. Except this is not usual, we’re not watching football. We’re at the TT, and we’re experiencing it together. A man slaps Tom on the shoulder and wishes us well—we’re wearing our Butterfields of Skipton Shaun Anderson team shirts. Davey Todd posts a faster lap than Dunlop—there’s an uproar. Dunlop comes back—more cheering. I’ve somehow found my people, and they are, inexplicably, unexpectedly, totally improbably, drunk middle aged men dressed in motorcycle merch.