“NOBODY’S GOT THE BALLS TO SAY IT, BUT WE’RE ALL SHITTING OURSELVES!”
This year’s Isle of Man TT fortnight is a big deal for John McGuinness: the 23-times TT winner celebrates his 50th birthday six weeks before practice gets underway, a few days later he’ll make his 100th TT start and a few days after that he may decide never to do it again.
It’s for these reasons I wanted to interview the second most successful rider in TT history, after the late, great Joey Dunlop.
It’s 2022, so we’re talking on FaceTime – me at home, McGuinness sat in his van, with his enduro bike tied down in the back. He’s off for a ride – it keeps him sane, he says – and although every minute of the interview costs him another minute that could be spent blasting across the Lancashire hills he’s as engaged, open and brutally honest as always.
“I’ll tell you if it’s my last TT after the Senior on 10th June,” he says. “If I told you now that this will definitely be my last TT, then that’s the one that’ll bite you, the one where you get squashed, isn’t it? So I don’t want to make any noise about it.
