Well, that was a TT. The 2026 races ran from 25 May to 6 June, and as a sponsor of the event we got to watch the whole thing play out from right here on the island. As you can imagine, it was busy times, and we loved every minute of it.
The weather had other plans for most of the fortnight. Mist sat over the Mountain, the rain kept coming back, and the schedule ended up being rebuilt almost daily as the organisers chased every dry window they could find. There were some long waits. But when the roads finally opened, the racing more than made up for them.
Dean Harrison set the standard early. He won the RST Superbike TT from the front, never looked troubled, and posted a fastest lap just shy of 135 mph. It was his first win in the Superbike class, and you could see how much it meant to him. The paddock clearly felt the same.
Michael Dunlop, meanwhile, carried on as only he does. He took the Supersport double, winning the opener by a little over twenty four seconds and then stretching the gap even wider in the second race, with Harrison chasing him down both times and still coming up short. Dunlop also won the new Sportbike class, which replaced the Supertwins this year, on his Paton. That moved his tally to thirty six TT wins. Nobody has ever won more, and at this point it is hard to picture anyone catching him.
It is worth pausing on that number for a second. Dunlop only took the outright wins record off his late uncle Joey a couple of years ago, and he has spent every TT since pushing it further out of reach. Joey held the mark for the best part of a quarter of a century. Watching the family name climb to thirty six in front of crowds who grew up on Dunlop stories is the sort of thing that gives you goosebumps, whichever rider you turned up to cheer for.
Peter Hickman was in the thick of it again, quick as ever in the Supersport races and rarely far off the podium. Behind the familiar names there was real strength too, with the likes of Josh Brookes, Paul Jordan, Mike Browne and Davey Todd all featuring across the week. That depth is half the appeal of the modern TT. You are no longer watching two or three riders pull clear of everyone else. The racing is close, the names are many, and any of a dozen riders can have a day that nobody saw coming.
And the racing is only ever half of it. Practice week does the warming up, and there is honestly nothing like standing near the course and hearing the bikes wind up to full speed for the first time. By race week the front runners were already lapping comfortably above 130 mph, which never stops being faintly terrifying when you watch it from a few feet away. The sidecars brought their usual mix of chaos and brilliance, and the smaller classes handed a few less familiar names their moment in the sun.
The ending was a frustrating one. The Senior, the big race of the meeting, got pulled forward to the Friday evening to dodge the forecast, then a red flag stopped it after a single lap. The rain dug in over the weekend, the mist would not shift, and the organisers eventually had to accept there was no safe way to run it again. So the result stood on that one lap. That handed Dean Harrison another win to round off a brilliant fortnight, with Hickman and Brookes alongside him. A couple of the second races were lost to the weather as well, which was a shame, but on a course like this the call is always going to be safety first.
What struck us most was that none of it dampened the mood. The grandstands stayed full. People kept turning up. The island carried on buzzing from early morning until well past the last bike of the day. We saw it in our bars, full of people picking the racing apart over a pint, and across our hotels and guest houses, busy with visitors who wanted to be in the middle of everything. If you stayed with us, thank you. You were a big part of why it felt the way it did.
There is far more to a TT than the racing, and that is what we will get into in part two. The atmosphere around Douglas, the business of actually getting around when half the roads are shut, and the question plenty of you have already been asking, which is when it all happens again next year.
For now we will stop on the racing, because it was a cracking run of it. Records gone, reputations made, and a course that, when the weather lets it, still serves up the best motorsport going. If this has you wishing you had been there, it is worth thinking about your next trip sooner rather than later, and we are always happy to help you sort somewhere to stay.
Part two lands shortly on our news page, where we look past the start line and turn to 2027.
