Learning the course, by Jamie Robinson
After competing in his first Isle of Man TT, Jamie Robinson put pen to paper to record his experience exclusively for iomtt.com.
This is the second instalment of story of the terrifying yet exhilarating thrill of taking on the Isle of Man TT for the first time.
I hardly slept the first night as the whole TT experience reverberated through my nerve endings and kept me awake for all but a few hours. I needed to talk to my new team manager Clive Padgett about the bike as it felt really stiff and I could still feel the bumps of Kerrowmoar while I lay under the duvet.
Clive was rushing back over to Donington Park BSB for a day or so and I knew he had a flight around 6:30am so I braved it and called him up just after 5am.
Luckily, and typically, Clive was still up and just happened to be in the back of his race truck measuring up suspension springs and working stuff out for their new Superbike. A good chat with Clive ended in me realising that there is little you can do to help the bike over all the bumps without it having a negative effect elsewhere.
I mean, you can’t make a bike perfect on a circuit this long anyway so everything is a compromise in some way and if you can deal with the majority of the bumps the bike will still go around corners and there is definitely plenty of those.
I quickly needed to get my head around the feeling of racing on the roads and the bumpier surface as this isn’t Brands Hatch. I’ve been proper spoilt racing only on silky smooth race-tracks in the short circuit world and to be truthful it’s all I have known since I ever started racing as this was my first ever road race.
I mean, I only passed my bike test a few months ago so, to be honest, the whole road thing was kind of a new feeling as well. A race bike on a road circuit is from another planet and this planet I am now on is physical, fast and tries to rip your head off your shoulders when it pops above the Perspex screen.
(Photo courtesy of Isle of Man Newspapers. To view more TT2008 pictures visit the website.)
It was a great relief when the next evening’s practice went well and I felt more comfortable as I now had more of an idea what to expect from the course and the bumps didn’t bother me half as much as they did the first evening.
The warmth was now coming from my glowing smile and the reflection from my orange jacket. By the third evening I was totally focused on improving my pace and as I did the place slowly turned from closed road in the Isle of Man into a racetrack; and this is when it got really interesting.
One of my main intentions was to build up slowly lap-by-lap as you tried to improve in areas where you had plenty of room left or people blasted passed you like you were stood still and made you realise that you needed to pull your socks up in that section.
On short circuits you can wait for a tow or if you mess up you just run off the track and at best you only have a few minutes to wait before you come around again and can have another crack at getting it right. The TT course is totally different as it was taking me around 20 minutes to do a lap and can only do two2 laps on a tank full.
You certainly don’t want to follow someone who is much faster than yourself as if you get it wrong, there is only one place you will end up and that is in serious trouble. So, little-by-little, step-by-step you have to serve your apprenticeship and take your time, not easy for a guy who puts two-minute noodles in the microwave for 60 seconds and squashes his tea bag repeatedly so it brews quicker.
The final instalment of Jamie’s story will be posted on Monday. Read the first instalment of Jamie’s story.