THIS YEAR’S ISLE OF MAN Tourist Trophy fortnight is a big deal for John McGuinness: the 23-time TT winner celebrates his 50th birthday six weeks before practice gets under way, a few days later he will make his 100th TT start, and a few days after that he may decide never to do it again.
These are reasons I wanted to interview the second most successful rider in TT history, after the late great Joey Dunlop.
It is 2022, so we are talking on FaceTime, myself at home, McGuinness in his van, with his enduro bike tied down in the back. He is off for a ride—it keeps him sane, he says—and although every minute of the interview costs him another minute of blasting across the Lancashire hills, he is 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 would 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 real noise about it.
‘We’ll make a decision after the
