Mat Oxley: Everything else is dull in comparison to the Isle of Man TT

Many years ago it was entirely normal for motorcycle racers to split their time between Brands Hatch and the Isle of Man TT. Nowadays, much less so. Short circuits and road circuits are different games, so most bike racers want to be masters of one, not jacks of both.

That’s why Davey Todd is different. Last year he became the first rider in decades to win a British championship and a TT in the same year. And the plan is to repeat the feat in 2025.

The 29-year-old Yorkshireman won his first TT last June, bettering the event’s main men, Michael Dunlop and Peter Hickman, in the Superstock race. A few days later he added victory in the Senior TT after lap-record holder Hickman crashed out at Ginger Hall, consoling himself with a pint in the nearby pub. Todd’s helmet-cam lap from 2024 is a must-watch on YouTube.

Todd is better than most at describing the sensation of racing around the world’s oldest racetrack, which is basically 37 miles of winding country roads, around which he averages 135mph, reaching 200mph.

“In a sense, riding the TT sort of ruins everything else in your life,” he says. “Because once you’ve had that level of buzz and thrill, that level of adrenaline, you can’t get it from anything else. I do all kinds of extreme sports – things like skydiving, bungee jumping and snowboarding – striving to get that buzz from something else, but I don’t think it’s possible.

“You’re not riding on the racing line. There’s a manhole or bad asphalt”

“At the first couple of British Superbike rounds after the TT, I’m genuinely sat on the grid with absolutely zero feeling inside me. I could fall asleep. I’m trying to get myself psyched for the race, but there’s nothing. You feel dead inside. The last two weeks have used up your next six months of adrenaline, so you’re sat on the grid and you feel like you’re on the sofa watching something on Netflix. It’s weird. Weird.”

Ten years ago Todd was struggling to make it as a professional racer when his rider friend Tom Booth-Amos phoned him.

“Tom said, ‘You’ve got to get out to the TT, it’s awesome, you’ll be blown away.’ But I couldn’t even afford a flight. He said, ‘Just get out here.’ I blagged a plane ticket and ended up sleeping on the floor of someone’s race truck for two weeks – no blankets, under a jacket, backpack for a pillow. Tom took me to the top of Bray Hill. We climbed over a fence and as soon as the first bikes came through, I thought, ‘Whatever it takes, I need to have a go at this.’ I just got the buzz for it immediately – from that moment.”

Todd started racing motocross when he was a kid and uses his off-road skills to manhandle motorcycles around the TT course, which is a kind of 200mph asphalt motocross circuit.

“I’m a motocross rider, so I’m used to jumps and bumps. Some TT sections are bumpy as hell, like Ginger Hall to Ramsey. There’s nothing on Earth like that section. You have to ride it like you’re riding a motocross bike, specifically like you ride a motocross bike in sand: keep the weight back and keep on the gas, because as soon as you chop the gas, the weight goes to the front and you have a huge tank-slapper. You have to ride the bumps by wheelieing over them.

“In motocross you stand up all the time, so I’m used to standing in a squatting position like a motocross rider. That’s what you have to do around the TT – you barely sit down. People don’t understand how little pressure you put into the seat. Even when you sit down you’re taking all the weight through your legs and the footpegs.”

The TT and short circuits are a bit like football and rugby – there are the same basics but very different – and it’s not easy switching back and forth.

“Going from the TT to BSB and back again, you’ve got to be able to switch your mindset and notice every detail about your riding, about what makes you fast, then completely change your riding style from one week to the next.

“At short circuits you gain loads of time by rushing into corners. I gain a lot of time by being extremely strong on the brakes and corner entry, but if I do that at the TT, I’ll lose time. On a short circuit it doesn’t usually matter if you sacrifice your exit speed because you’re straight into another corner, but at the TT there’s long straights after most corners, so you can’t sacrifice your exits. You need to make sure your exits are very strong every time.

“And you’re not necessarily riding on the racing line, because maybe there’s a manhole, or there’s a really bad bit of asphalt, or the camber really drops away at the side of the road, so you can’t run all the way to the left of the track before a right-hander, so you have to go into the corner in the middle of the track, which is something you’d never do on a short circuit. You have to be aware of all these things.”

This year’s TT race week runs from May 31 to June 7. Race highlights are on ITV4 and the event’s TT+ app shows races live.