Mat Oxley: The daredevils who tackle the TT on three wheels

Imagine racing a 220hp superbike around the Isle of Man’s 37.73-mile TT course, hitting speeds of 200mph as you thread the eye of a needle between dry-stone walls and hedges. Then imagine racing an inherently unstable three-wheeled motorcycle and a around the course’s twisting, undulating country lanes, surpassing 170mph in places and averaging over 120mph.

I know which I’d rather not do.

Ben (rider) and Tom (passenger) Birchall are made of sturdier stuff – the brothers have won 14 sidecar TTs over the last decade or so and are the current sidecar lap-record holders. For these achievements they were recently awarded the Royal Automobile Club’s Segrave Trophy, presented to motoring adventurers for “outstanding demonstrations of skill, courage and initiative”.

Previous winners include Donald and Malcolm Campbell, Stirling Moss, Amy Johnson, Mike Hailwood and Lewis Hamilton.

Sidecar racing at the TT is a highly choreographed ballet and an exercise in preventing mutually assured destruction. The rider’s job is to work the throttle, brakes and handlebars – a constant battle because the sidecar doesn’t even want to go straight. The passenger’s job is to be moveable ballast, clambering around the machine to balance it through corners. If the passenger gets it wrong the sidecar will most likely turn over.

“It’s not right, is it?” says Ben, 47, who is 10 years Tom’s senior. “Sidecars are just so unstable! One wheel drives, another wheel steers and the third wheel doesn’t do anything other than bounce around. Then you add two skilled lunatics and off you go!

“You have to be brave at the TT but if you’re too brave the course is going to have you, so you’ve got to contain your bravery, your lunacy and your aggression and turn it into something.

“The circuit is so fast so you’ve got to be ultra-sure of yourself”

“The biggest challenge is that everywhere is blind, so you need to know the circuit better than any other circuit, plus it’s so fast, so you’ve got to be ultra-confident and ultra-sure of yourself when you go into a corner in sixth gear. You can’t see the exit, but you know you’ve got to come out the other side. That’s the TT – the ‘ballsiness’ and the knowledge you need.”

When sidecars race around short circuits the passenger leans a long way out of the outfit, but at the TT there’s an unwritten rule that the living mass of moveable ballast stays within  the ‘chair’. For obvious reasons…

“If the bike gets sent off-line by a bump at somewhere like the bottom of Barregarrow [a hellishly uneven 140mph left-hander], it’ll come across half a metre and that’s enough to wipe my hip out and it’s game over,” says Tom.

Inevitably they’ve had a few near misses.

“Tom has come back with dock leaves in his visor and grass in his arse!” laughs Ben.

And even worse – two big crashes in 2012 and 2014 that had the brothers helicoptered to hospital. After that second  serious accident, surgeons considered amputating three fingers from Ben’s mangled right hand, but finally the injury was fixed with plates and wires.

They both know they’ve been lucky – four of the last six competitors to lose their lives at the TT were sidecar racers. Therefore you would think Ben and Tom return home from each TT thanking the gods they’re still alive. Not quite.

“You don’t get home jumping through hoops, you get home and you want to slit your throat,” says Ben. “Because you just want to wake up and do it again and again and again. It’s an absolute drug.”

“You’ve been operating for two weeks at this sky-high level, then you get home and you have to be a normal person again,” adds Tom. “It’s a dopamine crash, a chemical imbalance. What you get at the TT you don’t get anywhere else: that amount of concentration, that amount of accuracy, that amount of skill. You’ve got to be razor-sharp for an hour. It’s that dopamine thing – you’re alive, absolutely alive. It’s like licking a nine-volt battery [simultaneously licking the positive and negative terminals]. You know you shouldn’t but you know you’re going to get a buzz out of it.”

However, Tom finally decided he had had enough of the buzz, or more specifically, enough of rolling the dice, after the 2023 TT.

“I was always dead honest with myself,” he says. “Every year I never just walked into the TT blind. I’d go for a mountain-bike ride on my own, clear my head and ask myself, ‘Are you ready to commit to this?’ And I’d always said, ‘Yes.’ But after last year’s TT I asked myself and I couldn’t say it.

“On a 120mph lap the bike is doing different things in places you’d never expect. There were bits where I was sat there thinking, ‘Please,  just thread it through, just thread it through!’ When those thoughts start creeping into your head it’s time to stop. You’ve done enough.

“The final two laps of last year’s second sidecar race were the most sublime, surreal experience I’ve ever had on a bike – doing that 120mph lap, getting cheered on in the sunshine. We pulled into the winner’s enclosure and I just thought, ‘This is it, this is as good as it’ll ever get,” and it just felt like the right time. I’ve got good memories and I’m glad it happened, not sad that it’s stopped.”

Ben replaced Tom with Frenchman Kevin Rousseau for the 2024 TT. After an accident caused by a technical fault they took a hard-charging second-place finish. They will contest next year’s TT together, while Tom has moved into TV commentary.

Mat Oxley has covered motorcycle racing  for many years – and also has the distinction  of being an Isle of Man TT winner
Follow Mat on Twitter @matoxley