The Isle of Man TT has a printed schedule, but hewing to said schedule is not the TT’s specialty. There’s no sense getting upset about it. Even in late spring, weather in the Irish Sea can hardly be relied upon to cooperate. Accidents happen when the public-road course is open for general use, requiring investigation. Delays are accepted as inevitable.
Mark Higgins has already been delayed once. It’s Wednesday, June 4. He was supposed to have gone for his first real flying lap of the course yesterday. (Check out some footage of his practice lap in the video below.) Instead, he’s a hapless passenger in a Ford Transit minibus with a load of journalists, explaining the 37.73-mile Mountain Course. The Transit has been waylaid by traffic. Marshals are closing the course in preparation for the TT Zero electric-bike race, to be followed by directly by Higgins’ own lap of the circuit.
It’s 9:15 a.m. and we’re stuck on the outskirts of Ramsey. It’s the Isle of Man’s second-largest town and stands as the entrance to the Snaefell Mountain section of the impossibly huge course. Via phone, we’ve obtained a provisional pass from the race organizers to transit the closed segment to Creg-ny-Baa, a spot roughly three miles from the start/finish line in Douglas. There’s no way we’ll make it to Douglas in time for the former British Rally Champion to pick up the car in the pits and drive back up to the Creg, which has been chosen as Higgins’s push-off point to give the car and tires sufficient time to warm up before the flying start past the grandstands.
Said provisional clearance isn’t good enough for the marshals at the bottom of the hill. Discussion ensues. Subaru’s PR team is working the phones. Higgins is dialing numbers, too. The marshals busy themselves directing the Transit hither and thither to allow residents access to their homes. We stand around and smoke in the mild Ramsey sun, gazing up at the darkening clouds obscuring the top of Snaefell, 2000 feet up.
The marshals finally decide we can proceed over the mountain in convoy with them. In about 20 minutes’ time. At 30 mph. At this point, it’s still a faster option than leaving now and trying to wade our way around to Douglas on roads packed with buses, cars and motorcycles.
The car’s coming up to meet us, then. Oh, the car! It’s mostly a production, US-spec unit. The 2015 STI’s fitted with a cage, the speed limiter’s removed, and sticky, barely-legal Dunlop Direzza rubber is wrapped around the gold wheels. The calipers and rotors are stock, the pads upgraded. The springs and dampers are swapped for units that are a bit more rally-esque to offer more compliance over the uneven course at speed.
These Hybrid Moments . . .
Lapping the course in 22 minutes, 9 seconds at an average speed of 102 mph, Tony Pond set a production-car record of the course back in 1990 in a Rover 827 Vitesse, sort of a glorified Acura Legend. Higgins has been dreaming of breaking his record for years. Subaru of America was the first company the Manxman approached that was able to make an attempt happen, back in 2011. And perhaps the only reason there’s another attack on the Mountain Course this year is a little incident known now as “The Moment.” With Chris Cantle of our sister publication Road Track riding shotgun, Higgins’s 2011 attempt nearly ended in disaster
Three years ago, on his second run, just past the start/finish line in Douglas and at the bottom of Bray Hill, the Subie hit full suspension compression and got very loose. Higgins went into a wild series of corrections, keeping the STI off the walls as the car careened its way up Ago’s Leap. Three years after the fact, Cantle notes, “I still get a little anxious watching that thing. All I wanted was to get through that whole ride without being the screaming passenger.”
The resultant video found itself seared into the minds of gearheads around the world. Suddenly, Subaru had a viral smash on its hands. Higgins’s runs had gone from a neat little footnote to the motorcycle races to a “what’s gonna happen next?” sort of capital-e Event. The fact that Higgins broke Pond’s record, clocking a 115.36 mph average, wound up being secondary to the amazing save.
Which is in line with the whole mystique of the TT. Though nobody speaks of it directly in any official capacity, the event thrives on the possibility, indeed, the inevitability of fatal catastrophe on the course. Hell, the genesis of big-time motorsport on the island was a middle finger salute to England’s fin de siècle health-and-safety culture. When the British, unsure of the motorcar’s assault on decency and horsemanship, limited automobiles to a mere 20 miles per hour, racing organizers looked west to an island in the middle of the Irish Sea, roughly equidistant from the coasts of Cumbria in England and County Down in Northern Ireland.
The Manx were more than happy to host the 1904 Gordon Bennett Elimination Trials. The automotive Tourist Trophy followed the next year. Motorcycles began racing the TT in 1907, while the Snaefell Mountain Course entered the picture in 1911. Men have been paying the ultimate price at speed on Manx roads ever since. It’s civilians on “Mad Sunday,” when motorcyclists from all walks of life have a free-for-all over the Mountain Course. It’s useless trying to counter the collective red mist. Red asphalt is the result. Signs reading “Links fahren!” dot the area, reminding German tourists that they’re not in Bad Homburg anymore and must ride on the left to avoid head-on collisions with those on the legally correct side of the road. Sometimes it works.
Creg’s List
We pile out of the Transit at Creg-ny-Baa. Manx for “rock of the cow,” the Creg consists of a high-speed downhill right-hander signaling the transition from the mountain section back to the Douglas area. The just-arrived STI goes up on jack stands and the wheels come off, and then go back on with warmers wrapped around the tires. Higgins consults with the crew as he pulls on his fire suit in full view of anybody who cares to wander over from the grandstand. The electric bikes of the TT Zero class whip by in the background, with only the occasional screech of tires alerting us to their presence.
Higgins’s veneer of stoic professionalism remains intact, but we find ourselves wishing the man had his own private moment to drive up to the Creg instead of having to steel himself in full view of a group of Yankee journos. We don’t ask questions out of respect. Duty mandates that we keep pointing lenses at him. The marshals shove the barrier aside and he’s off. The Subaru moving out onto the course, straight pipes blaring as the turbo boxer winds up coming off the Creg, is almost anticlimactic. We don’t have time to think about it. We’ve gotta move if we want to be at the finish line when Higgins arrives.
#1 Smash Hit Record
We make haste back to the Transit and scuttle down to Douglas via back roads, listening to updates on the Ford’s radio. Mark is across the line before we can park the van, having traveled nearly seven times our distance in 19 minutes and 26 seconds. Average speed? 116.47 mph. He’s pleased to have broken his own record, but feels like he left 20 seconds on the course. Isle of Man veteran and freshly minted TT Zero champ John McGuinness ribs him about being slower than the electric bikes. The Subie reeks of hot coolant and cooked pads. Higgins ran out of brakes somewhere between the Creg and the finish line, overshot the Signpost corner and had to use the handbrake to save it. Not quite the trip down Hairball Alley that was The Moment, but neither is it a save to sneeze at. Another run is scheduled for the following day, when we’ll be on a plane back to the States.
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In true TT style, an attempt to better the lap time was pushed off an additional day. We just received word from Subaru that Higgins’s attempt this morning netted him a new record: 19:15 at 117.51 mph. He’s now faster than himself, Tony Pond, and John McGuinness on his Mugen Shinden e-bike. As for us? We’re racking our brains in the hope of conjuring up a way to convince Hearst that C/D needs an Isle of Man bureau. It’s a gem of a place where nothing makes sense, yet makes perfect sense. It’s hokey to claim that the TT is one of the last pure major motorsports events in the world, yet it’d be fallacious to claim that it isn’t. Go before the world comes to its senses and neuters—or bans—the thing.
