While I am a motorcycle rider, I don’t have a lot of interest in motorcycle racing. There is, however, one notable exception – I am absolutely obsessed with the Isle of Man TT.
If you’re not familiar, here are a few facts. The race is held annually on, as you’d suspect, the Isle of Man, a 221 square mile island in the Irish Sea. The race was first held in 1907, and the 2023 edition was the 102nd running of the event. The course is a 37.7 mile loop entirely on public roads, with the longest races requiring six laps to complete. It’s a time trial, so motorcycles enter the course at intervals and are racing against the clock, though they will pass one another at times. And since the race is on public roads riders have to contend with, well, the things you’d expect on public roads. Curbs. Buildings. Trees. Places where going off the side of the road will see you rolling down the side of a mountain. You know, the kind of things that can kill you quite easily when you’re traveling at average speeds of well over 100 miles per hour. The current record for highest average speed is 136 mph, and top speeds can be in excess of 200 mph.
The race footage is breathtaking, all the more so on today’s HD televisions. On-board cameras give you the driver’s view that at times can actually make you slightly queasy as the bikes bank hard into corners, vibrate on high-speed straights, and occasionally see both tires coming off the road. The scenery is stunning, the athleticism is impressive, and the technology complex.
But it’s also incredibly dangerous.
I can’t find definitive numbers, but one source indicated that 117 riders (including sidecar passengers… yes, you read that right, sidecar passengers) participated in 2023, and that seems about right when looking at the numbers assigned to riders and bikes in the 2022 race results. And of those 120 or so riders who participated in 2022, six of them died.
Let me repeat that. Six of them died. Roughly 5% of the entrants died as a result of injuries sustained on the course (French sidecar passenger Olivier Lavorel survived his crash, but died four months later as a result of those injuries).
To be fair, 2022 was one of the deadliest Isle of Man TT events ever. However, the fatality rate is staggering – 156 competitors have died during the 102 runnings of the Isle of Man TT (through 2023), along with a handful of race officials and two spectators. Since 2000 the event has been held 22 times (with two years cancelled due to COVID), and during that span only three years have seen no fatalities. If you include the other race that uses the same course, the Manx Grand Prix, there has only been a single year without a fatality on the route since 1937, and that was back in 1982.
The Isle of Man TT is arguably the most dangerous major sporting event in the world.
You’re probably wondering why the hell I’m writing about this motorcycle race on a vinyl blog. Well, that’s because starting in the late 1950s and through the 1960s the UK label Sound Stories produced a series of records about the Isle of Man TT races.
This sounds completely absurd today. A vinyl record about a sporting event? But consider that in the 1960s most people, other than those actually on the Isle of Man, likely had no way to see any of the races outside of perhaps some clips on the evening news or perhaps some kind of televised special. Maybe they were broadcast on the radio or for a segment on Wide World of Sports. The races happened, and they they were done, and you couldn’t see or experience them again. So these Sound Stories records were a way to connect with those events.
I’ve been interested in these records for a while, in no small part due to the incredibly cool covers. The problem is that most copies for sale are in the UK, and while the records themselves are often affordable, the shipping can at times triple the total cost. Fortunately I came across an eBay listing for a group of nine from a seller in the US, so I grabbed them.
The 1964 record (shown above) opens with the sound of a sidecar bike zooming by the microphone, its engine screaming as it passes. We’re treated to a series of interview clips and some commentary by Murray Walker, the announcer explaining how riders were performing at different times in the races, his observations separated by the sounds of motorcycle engines.
It’s odd to listen to a record like this. I wonder about who bought these, and how they experienced the records. I can imagine a motorcycle-obsessed kid playing this over and over, focused on the sounds of the various sized engines (Murray Walker often tells us the engine size and number of cylinders before we hear its sound), fascinated with their power and dreaming of someday racing. Perhaps also the adult motorcycle racing enthusiast, particularly if one of their favorite riders pulled off a win. In a way these Isle of Man TT records are similar to a podcast, just in physical form, but they were also a piece of memorabilia, a way of physically connecting with something that you couldn’t experience directly.
As near as I can tell, the Sound Stories releases cover the Isle of Man TT from 1957 through about 1968. There are also a handful of records devoted to specific drivers, as well as others related to auto racing and, yes, locomotives.
I still search for these from time to time. In fact while writing this I found a 1959 copy listed by a US seller on eBay, and I’ll probably put in a “Make Offer” bid on it later today. If I can get these at the right price, I’ll grab ‘em because they are fun to put on from time to time.