Motorcycle racing’s holy trinity and bad news from the Isle of Man

The TT owes its existence to Britain’s equine-obsessed establishment, who banned motor racing on British roads, so the RAC (Royal Automobile Club) and ACU (Auto Cycle Union) organised races on the Isle of Man, which had its own government and still does. Hence its ability to maintain an event that most other governments would’ve banned by now.

Victor Surridge became the TT’s first fatality in 1911 and death has been a regular part of the event – run around a 37¾-mile lap of public roads bordered by houses, walls and telegraph poles – ever since.

Surely there can’t be a TT fan who 100% loves the TT; it has to be a love/hate relationship. Even 23-times winner John McGuinness, who rode his 100th TT race on Saturday, sees both sides.

“Yeah, people get killed, we know that,” he told me recently. “But no one’s got a gun to their head. It’s your choice – if you want to do it, do it.

“I know the place has got a lot to answer for – it’s ruined lives, ruined marriages and all sorts but the other side of it is pretty special.”

The really special bit is the buzz, which is like no other, which is why four-times World Superbike champion Carl Fogarty still remembers his TT rides more fondly than any of his short-circuit rides.

The risk is huge, of course, but it’s not a Russian-roulette risk, the buzz is using your skill and everything else you’ve got to ride the knife edge between the walls and hedgerows. And all racers race for the buzz, whether they’re on the Island or at Barcelona-Catalunya.

I’ve fallen in love with the TT and fallen out of love with the TT several times over the decades but my philosophical belief is that you own your own body outright, so you can do whatever you like with it, so long as you don’t hurt anyone else.

“We don’t have no way to get a job and few of us can get nothing unless we can box and now you want to run that out.”

His words made me think about all the TT riders with whom I’ve discussed the perennial question: should the TT stay, or should it go?

Spa-Francorchamps has also lived through controversy. The original super-fast nine-mile street circuit claimed the lives of six GP riders in the 1950s alone. Riders use to joke (darkly) that there were so many memorials around the circuit that one day someone could make them into a fence.

In the late 1970s a shorter, safer and mostly purpose-built Spa was built, using a couple of miles of the original circuit, from the scary-fast Blanchimont left-handers to the legendary Eau Rouge/Raidillon section.

Finally that layout was deemed too dangerous for motorcycle world championship racing. The last GP was staged there in 1990 and World Superbike and Endurance World Championships stopped visiting in subsequent years.

Three years ago the local Walloon government decided to get motorcycles back to Spa, offering 30 million Euros of funding to bring the track up to EWC spec. Further improvements will be required if Spa is to reach its goal of staging a MotoGP round. The work has been carried out by renowned Italian company Dromo, which has also done work at Mugello, Sepang, Misano, Circuit Paul Ricard and the latest upgrades at Silverstone.

At noon last Saturday the first Spa 24 hour in around two decades got underway. The race was a thriller, despite safety cars and a red flag, with third position changing on the very last lap.

Among the riders was former World Supersport champion and three-times World Superbike runner-up Chaz Davies, who rode a Ducati Panigale for the ERC Endurance team with David Checa and Xavi Forès. Davies had never done endurance and was in for quite a surprise, because Spa is so fast and so dark at night. He rode into the early hours of Sunday morning when the Panigale expired with fuelling issues.

Montjuïc hosted motorcycle GPs from 1951 to 1972, after which it was removed from the world championships, even though there had been no GP rider deaths during that period.

For decades the circuit also hosted a 24-hour race, which did claim the lives of many riders. When Mingo Parés was killed during the 1986 event the parkland road circuit was closed and work started on a short-circuit replacement.

Construction work on Barcelona-Catalunya began less than three years later and the new track hosted its first Grand Prix in May 1992.

The circuit is particularly significant now because if MotoGP was a country then Barcelona-Catalunya would be its capital. (Although you might also argue that Andorra is MotoGP’s capital.)

A quarter of the current MotoGP grid was born and bred in the region of Catalunya, many teams throughout MotoGP, Moto2, Moto3, World Superbike and the Junior World Championship have their bases in and around Barcelona. And riders like Takaaki Nakagami (so lucky to avoid serious injury in Sunday’s Catalan GP), Ai Ogura and Somkiat Chantra, plus TSR Honda France EWC boss Masa Fujii and many other outsiders call the city home during the racing season.

By the way, Nakagami’s Catalunya crash proved that the threat of serious injury or worse is ever-present in motorcycle racing, wherever you race, because you cannot protect a bike racer with a carbon-fibre safety cell and a halo.

And MotoGP shouldn’t forget that while it is the safest form of motorcycle racing it has taken the lives of four riders over the past decade or so, GP’s worst death rate since the late 1980s and early 1990s. One of these riders – Luis Salom – died during practice for the 2016 Catalan GP Moto2 race.

Each of motorcycle racing’s holy trinity of venues – from the most dangerous, to the darkest and (supposedly) one of the safest – has its own story but ultimately they are all part of the same game.