Pure insanity on two wheels.

[sir pball]

Peter Hickman calmly narrating his record lap at the Isle of Man TT - his average speed over 37.73 miles of public roads was 135.452 mph.

"Gotta watch your shoulder on the wall." "One-seventy-five, maybe 180 mile an hour, just over the top of that jump right there."

At a certain point, you stop being shocked by how many people have died here. (260 since 1907) The shock is how many are still alive.

[ret5hd]

1. Pffft...I could do better...

if I was talented enough and not afraid of dying.

[sir pball]

2. Not sure those guys aren't afraid of dying..

..it's the fear that keeps you sharp. They don't go to die, they go to do it and survive.

[SonofDonald]

3. Riding on the edge

Just freakin insane.

[sir pball]

4. The World's Fastest Death Cult.

https://jalopnik.com/the-worlds-fastest-death-cult-1713550981

The riders. They’re doing 160, 170, 180 mph here, depending on the bike. It’ll be 190 at the bottom of the hill, called Bray Hill, where there’s a compression and the bike scrapes the ground before it hops up and wheelies.

You think of them as burly, out-of-the-past men. But seeing them on these bikes, even the biggest and the fastest ones, the impression isn’t of bravery or daring.

It’s fragility.

You only get a fraction of a second watching them coming, steaming down the hill on this two lane road. But you get a few seconds longer watching them going. They shoot past you in a flash, but there’s a couple moments to take in how they bend right up to the street gutter, nearly graze the curb, then drop away into the horizon.

The more I spoke to people about the races in the face of their danger, the more I was left with a lot of double talk. I expected a kind of nihilistic bravado from the actual entrants of the race. McGuinness did once refer to TT racers as “a bunch of hard-nosed bastards,” after all. The TT does have a certain kind of cultish magnetism, an embodiment of some pent up self-destructive desire to ride so fast the wind tears you to shreds.

But the riders said they weren’t going because they thought they might die. They said they went specifically because they believed that they would survive and finish and succeed.

And then just as quickly as they started to affirm the living spirit of the race, they also talked about the “moments” they’ve had out on the course. When death was a few inches away. When they scraped that curb they were only supposed to graze. Ride along with them and they’ll readily point out each and every corner they know where another rider, another friend, ate it.

It’s the same with the locals. Their voices turn somber when I bring up death, but then they’ll turn around and tell you horror stories from when things go wrong on the TT. Midair impacts turning humans into rag dolls. Body bags on front lawns. Guts spilling out of chests. What I heard from a mechanic whose son runs in amateur auto races on the Isle — forget horror, they sounded like war stories. They’re anxious as the rest of us, maybe unsure of their role in this deadly circus.

But they keep showing up every year, all in a way that defies any sort of logic. The tourists, the sportbike pilgrims, the locals, the racers. The momentum keeps rolling along, like a tire skipping across a cat’s eye at 200.