From Triumph to Tragedy: 'Closer to the Edge' Dives Deep into the Isle of Man TT 

If a 21st century Formula 1 luminary like Toto Wolff thinks the world’s most anachronistic motor sport contest is worth visiting personally, then surely the event has a story worth telling.

A decade ago director Richard De Aragues tried telling that story in TT3D Closer to the Edge. The 104-minute film (ignore the fact that it was filmed in 3D) was seen in cinemas throughout Britain, becoming one of the country’s biggest-grossing documentaries at the time. 

The Isle of Man TT certainly has a story, but it’s not an easy tale to tell. Already half a century ago the British media had christened the event’s home ‘Blood Island’, due to the frequent fatalities, sometimes as many as four or five during two weeks of practice and racing.

The answer, of course, is to tell the story from the inside, from the point of view of the riders, their teams and their loved ones. Why do they do it? What do they get from hurtling down country lanes at close to 200 miles an hour? What do they think when the worst happens?

Inevitably, sport documentaries rely largely on luck. The lucky director points his camera and things happen – the high drama and humanity that explain our obsession with sport. The unlucky director points his camera and nothing of note happens. De Aragues was definitely lucky. He covered the 2010 TT, which had it all.

His primary focus is a young maverick called Guy Martin, contesting his seventh TT, still looking for a first victory and yet to become a TV personality. Martin didn’t win a race in 2010 because Yorkshireman Ian Hutchinson won the lot, becoming the first rider in history to win five TTs in a week. De Aragues also got the dark side of the guts and glory: terrifying accidents – including Martin – horrific injuries and death. All these elements create a powerful roller- coaster of a film: one moment the hairs on the back of your neck are standing up, the next moment you’re welling up.

Martin is a natural star. He has huge magnetism, which is why he became TV’s so-called celebrity speedster. In TT3D he was new to the screen, barely aware of the camera, scruffy, sweary and entertaining, a bit like a 1970s footballer.

The supporting cast of riders is multiple winners Hutchinson, John McGuinness and Michael Dunlop and Manxman Conor Cummins, who ends the film in a worse mess than Martin, his back broken in five places.

The first racing events on the Isle of Man took place in the early years of the 20th century, thanks to the British mainland’s 20mph speed limit. The inaugural Gordon Bennett car race of 1904 was followed three years later by the first motorcycle TT.

In 1911 the event expanded into the current 37.75-mile Mountain Course. That year’s Senior TT was won by Oliver Godfrey, at 47.63mph. The current race record stands at 131.7mph.

If Godfrey contested the TT today he would recognise the course, which is the same roads, with the same houses, pubs, drystone walls and sometimes the same trees in the same places.

Since 1911 the Mountain Course has claimed the lives of 260 competitors. Another 29 have died since TT3D was made, 17 at the TT, 12 during the lesser-known Manx grand prix and Classic TT events. That’s an average of two deaths per TT, from an entry of around 75 riders.

In a world ruled by health-and-safety wonks those numbers do not compute. The only reason the TT continues is that Tynwald, the Manx parliament, makes its own laws. If Tynwald chooses to raise money by staging a deadly motorcycle race and creating an offshore centre for tax avoidance then so be it.

The dangers of racing around a small island in the Irish sea loom over TT3D like Manx fog. To the casual viewer the whole thing seems insane, even reprehensible, certainly when you see the riders’ wives, girlfriends and kids waiting nervously for news of their loved ones.

“The road goes quiet here – we’re still awaiting machine number eight [Martin],” says the commentator at Ballaugh Bridge, 17 miles into the lap. “And here’s Cummins at number 10, so we don’t have Guy Martin… Martin is missing. We’ve got a red-flag situation, because a fire engine has to go on the track. It’s clearly something very serious…”

The paddock goes deadly quiet. Martin’s crew is on the verge of breakdown.

The riders either joke about the dangers or get philosophical.

“Are roadracers a bit mad?” wonders Martin. “Umm… what would you say? A tile short of a roof, one short of a six pack, a few slates adrift, the lights are on but no one’s home…”

“It has to cross your mind that you may not be coming back”
John McGuinness

McGuinness – 23 times a TT winner – isn’t afraid to admit that the races exert a certain terror upon him. “I’m nervous months before,” says the Lancastrian who used to bunk off school and stowaway on the ferry to watch the races when he was a kid. “When I think about the TT it makes me skip a heartbeat. I have to have the house and garage immaculate, just in case something does happen, then everything’s ready. It has to cross your mind because it’s the reality – you might not come back.”

Dunlop, who’s lost his father, brother and uncle to roadracing, describes the feeling of waiting at the start line. “My mind goes completely blank,” he says. “My mind goes into madness.” 

Incredibly, there is one thing bigger than the danger, one thing bigger than the fear of “coming home in a box” (as nine-times TT winner David Jefferies said shortly before he lost his life during the 2003 races): the buzz.

This is the counterpoint at play throughout TT3D. And you’re never quite sure whether the danger and the buzz are in conflict with each other or dancing with each other.

“I hit the kerb with my arse at 120 miles an hour,” says Martin, describing an earlier crash at an Irish roadrace. “That was another one of of those moments when I just thought, ooph! But that’s a buzz – get it wrong, if you’re an inch out – yeah, we like that… You end up in that position where it looks like it’s going to be game-over… money can’t buy the buzz you get from that.”

“You get a buzz out of short-circuit racing but it’s not the same,” says New Zealander Cameron Donald, another two-times winner. “Circuit racing is rock climbing with a rope. It’s dangerous but there’s room for error – if you slip or fall you’ve got a rope. Roadracing is like free climbing. There’s no room for error – if you make a mistake it could be serious injury or worse.”

The film counts down to the races via Martin’s frequent run-ins with the TT authorities. Race week starts with the 1000cc Superbike TT, the first of two 600cc Supersport TTs and the 1000cc Superstock TT (for showroom-spec bikes). Martin is up front in all of them, battling for that elusive first victory, often denied by just a few seconds.

Things start to go wrong in the last two races. New Zealander Paul Dobbs crashes at Ballagarey – nicknamed Ballascary by the riders, with good reason – and is killed instantly. The corner is a 160mph right-hander through the village of Glen Vine that precedes a three-mile flat-out section, so it’s crucial to get through as fast as you can.

Two laps later Martin Loicht crashes at Quarry Bends. The Austrian succumbs to his injuries later that day in hospital.

The next day it’s the Senior TT, the highpoint, the same race Godfrey won in 1911. It’s also the last chance for the riders to win a TT for 51 weeks. The pressure is tangible.

Martin leads the early stages by a fraction of a second. He’s still in the fight when he takes the first of his two pit stops – fuel and new rear tyre – after lap two of six. Minutes later and he’s attacking Ballagarey. “I thought, the job’s looking good – 131 from a standing start and battling for the lead,” says Martin, from his hospital bed. “I got five miles out from the pit stop and tucked the front. I thought, I’ve got it, got it, got it… no, I haven’t got it.”

Martin’s bike – with full fuel tank – explodes into a ball of flames on impact, setting the trackside haybales ablaze. Martin finally stops tumbling and rolling a few hundred yards up the road, unconscious.

“I ended up in the wall, but I’m still here,” he adds, high as a kite on painkillers. “I’ve only lost a bit of bark, got a few broken ribs, punctured a lung, four chipped vertebrae and two cracked vertebrae. Apart from that I’m like a new ’un.”

The race is red-flagged and restarted, over four laps. This time Cummins is fighting for the lead with Hutchinson and McGuinness. On lap three he’s on the mountain section, sweeping into Veranda, a 130mph triple-apex right-hander, when the bike gets unsettled and Cummins loses control. The accident is filmed from a TV helicopter, the footage more like war than sport.

Cummins is tossed down the mountainside, bouncing over a drystone wall, the wreckage of his smoking, steaming motorcycle scattering sheep in all directions.

The fall breaks his back in five places, breaks his pelvis, fractures an arm in four places, fractures a shoulder, dislocates a knee and bruises a lung.

The cameras catch up with Cummins a few months later in a Manx café. 

“It does get to you a little bit,” he says, weakly. “It’s been a big challenge mentally to get my head around it. But there’s no chance I’m giving up. I accept I’ve been really, really lucky but my love for bike racing is still there and at the first opportunity I’ll be straight back on it.”

The cameras also catch up with Dobbs’ remarkably stoic widow, Bridget, back in New Zealand with their two young kids.

“I had one of those moments I get once or twice during every TT fortnight,” she says, recalling the build-up to the race that claimed her husband’s life. “I was just looking around, seeing the bikes and everything else going on and I just thought, ‘I love this’.

“I still love the TT, still love the island. You can’t love the death, you can’t love the loss, but you can’t love the excitement and the thrill without knowing that’s part of it. It wouldn’t be so exciting if it didn’t have the risk. That’s why they want to do it.”

“I struggle with life because I just can’t get a buzz after the TT” Richard ‘Milky’ Quayle

Several riders use the drug-addict analogy during the film. 

“I haven’t raced here for eight or nine years and I still struggle with life because I can’t get any buzz,” says another TT winner, Milky Quayle. “You’re a bit like a drug addict, you can’t get it out of your system.”

TT3D ends with perhaps the ultimate of ironies. A few weeks after Hutchinson made TT history he’s contesting the penultimate round of the British Superbike series in the wide-open spaces of Silverstone. 

There’s a first-corner pile-up during which Hutchinson gets run over. His left tibia and fibula are both so badly smashed that over the next year or so he’s in and out of hospital – 24 operations including one 16-hour epic.

“They were talking about amputating the leg,” he says. “There was only one reason I didn’t want it amputated, and that was so I could race a motorbike again – nothing else really matters.”

TT3D is an acute look into the mindset of motorcycle roadracers. And it may help you understand why these people do what they do. On the other hand it may not.