You know you are there when you arrive. You couldn't be anywhere else but the Joey Dunlop Recreation Centre. Ballybogey, Bushmills and Armoy sweeping north into the seaside town and the Portrush promenade. In the background there's a constant thrum of engine. It bellows and ebbs but is always there.
Lamp-posts and kerbs are buffered, post boxes pillowed. Three towns gripped by the triangle shaped circuit that cuts them and binds them.
Coleraine. Portrush. Portstewart. The Derry-Antrim Côte d’Azur and the Northwest 200. More an immersion than an arrival. A pilgrimage as much as a destination.
In this week of rain, sun and hurtling clouds, the bikes have been arriving in pods and in long thin lines. Machines buzz up the coast from Larne, where the ferry disgorges dozens at a time, all of them snaking upwards along the rugged Causeway coast.
Some open their engines and disappear to a speck on the horizon. Others roll in solemn and stately, military columns on two wheels heading for the course, neat knapsacks on their backs, cameras attached to their helmets. They pour into a hinterland quilted with caravan parks and breaking surf.
“Straight up tha’ way,” says one of the 800 volunteers at the racing paddock. “See tha’ space there up on yon grass. That’ll do you.”
For 80 years the middle of May has been me-time for bikers. The roads give way to the machines, the fields to camp sites and paddocks where the teams set up and glorify their hardware.
Two days of practice and two days of racing draw in the dedicated and curious from across the world. This year the Chinese arrived for the first time. They know where to find the riders who can do it.
Doing it is what road racers do. Recruiting for their November event in Macau, a squadron of smiling Asian officials pick among the food stalls and tents.
The Harry Gregg Foundation stands among them. Rugby country too. Members of the Christian Motorcyclists Association hand out leaflets. A FREE JESUS bus takes off down the road.
Not far away BMW and its Tyco team span across the site. William Dunlop rides for them. Son of Robert, nephew of Joey. His brother Michael is up the field with Milwaukee Yamaha. Their sobering history is blood and glory.
Both have won at the Northwest four times. Their father Robert won 15 races and their uncle Joey 13. In all the Dunlop family have a dynastic hold on the numbers, 36 wins on this circuit alone.
Everyone is trying to muscle in
“You start with the sea on your right-hand side. It’s a third-gear right-hand corner into a left. Quite fast, 90mph to 100mph. Then it’s down to a dead stop for York hairpin. First gear. You wobble round. That’s where you’ll see plenty of action on race day. Everyone is trying to muscle in. You’ll always get someone who brakes too much,” says English rider Paul Shoesmith.
In 2008, Robert Dunlop was out on the course in practice when his 250cc Yamaha seized near Mather's Cross. Teenager Michael and older brother William were following on their machines.
The crash killed Robert just as a crash killed brother Joey in Estonia eight years before. The sons came across their dead father on the road and stopped.
“I held his hand and prayed he’d be all right,” said Michael.
Fewer than 48 hours later, between the coffin and the grave, the brothers defied official orders not to race and lined up at their positions. William’s bike failed on the grid. Michael’s screamed off from the start line towards Primrose Hill and York Corner.
That day he took the chequered flag to unrivalled emotional scenes. It was a brutal changing of the guard like no other before and probably no other again. The next day he shouldered the coffin of his 47-year-old father into Garryduff Presbyterian Church near Ballymoney. Martin McGuinness and Ian Paisley were there.
Behind them walked Robert’s sisters, Linda and Virginia as well as Jim, the last of the three Dunlop brothers and the only one to have retired from road racing. Since 1939, 16 riders have died on the run, the most recent, 33-year-old Simon Andrews just last year. It’s an aspect of the Northwest from which no one can turn.
“There is no armour against fate”, said Andrews’s father Stuart this week, adding that his son had never lived in fear of the safety risks posed by racing. “People ask, ‘do you have regrets?’ or ‘are you sad?’ but it’s difficult to be sad for someone who lived life to the maximum.”
Crushed and stoic, Stuart was this week milling among the bike crews in the team paddock.
Majority hitting 200mph plus
“It’s head down, knees in all the way to university. It’s where you get maximum speed. But it’s holding it. You get completely behind the bubble, the shield, try and get into someone’s slip stream. The majority will be hitting 200mph plus.
“Everyone calls it a straight. It’s not. It’s a country lane and you can’t see the end of it. You’re constantly going up and down and through trees but you can keep it flat out.
“You get over 150mph and then you really have to concentrate on just what’s in front of you. It’s a tunnel. At 130mph you can look at what’s going on in your peripheral vision but heading towards 200mph it’s a blur. So you concentrate on a pinpoint of where you are going. It’s scary. No two ways about that. It’s a special thing to do. You are going so fast you want to grab the brakes earlier. You think you’re not going to make it. Then all of a sudden it’s wow . . .” says Shoesmith.
In practice for the 2012 event the speed gun caught Somerset rider Martin Jessopp travelling at 208 mph. A mosquito passing. It's what they do and why people come to watch them ride that precarious line between life and death.
Blackhill is such a place to watch. You first hear the noise creeping closer and see their helmets in the shimmer, the leader’s outline sharpening first. They crest the hill and the front wheels are trying to rise.
The riders are leaning forward to keep the wheel down. Because of the acceleration and the road the wheel wants to lift. They are going around a bend, so they lean forwards and sideways, determined to keep the power on, millimetres from the kerb.
Behind the metal grills that protect the people watching from the front gardens, there is a hushed gasp as machines whine a different note in the air. Hands come half way towards covering faces and stop. Frozen.
The thrill is watching the management of something that is too dangerous. It’s running the bulls in Pamplona, free climbing Teflon Corner in the Sierra Nevada’s El Capitan, 2,000 feet up, no rope. The connection has been made before between road racers and free solo climbers, the different wiring, the mysterious sangfroid and absence of fear.
"The only difference is that climbing is not a spectator sport," says Stephen Davison, author of several books on the Dunlops and a Northwest official. His point is if people saw the climbers fall on YouTube – 12 "notable" fatalities listed since 1980 – they may take a different view of the Californian spike.
The numbers that flood into this small swathe of turf vary between 100,000 and 150,000. Nobody really knows. People are scattered along the eight miles in doorways and fields, gaps between hedges and pay only for the Grand Stands erected around the course.
There has been resurgence over the last five years and the police have reported figures of 85,000 for the 2014 races. The numbers vary and are weather averse. But the towns embrace it as a festival.
“You’re talking 85,000-100,000 people,” says event director Mervyn Whyte. “It brings a massive amount of people from all over the world.
“Our main source of income is through the sale of programmes. We sell roughly 10,000. Not a massive amount when you see how many come to the event. Then we follow on with support from the council, from the BBC and from our sponsors Vauxhall and the individual race sponsors. That comes to about £800,000 and it just about covers itself. We are not flush with money but work from year to year.”
It costs in the region of £800,000 (€1.1 million) to put on. The Grand Stand seating is £60,000, medical expenses roughly £30,000. It costs upwards of £100,000 to build the course and then the hospitality, toilets and other services runs up to another £100,000.
It has public liability of £30 million cover. This year that cost £27,000. The riders look after their own insurance. The 2013 figures show that the local economy benefits by £4.5 million and Northern Ireland by about £9 million.
Over the magic roundabout
“Then you head over the magic roundabout. Go around that the wrong way. It’s a run down to a chicane. That section you get to 160-170mph. It’s a bumpy surface so you’ve really got to cling on there. You are braking hard on bumps which lifts the back wheel up so you have to release a bit of brake to get it down.
“Go through Juniper chicane and you are on a run to Metropole. The good thing about that is you’re going downhill. It’s wide but you can see the end. That’s a good thing. You get up to full speed. Here there’s a good impression of the speed because you are going past people’s houses, lamp-posts, all sorts of things. Then you throw the anchor out and get everything stopped by Metropole,” says Shoesmith.
Kirkistown, Tandragee, Armoy, Dundrod, Cookstown, Faugheen, Dunboyne and Skerries are the hardcore pockets. There are maybe 15 events run on public roads between April and October. In track racing, which many also do, they can almost body surf the run off sand on their leathers and walk away. Nothing to hit.
Here riders despise some of the safety measures.
This week the outspoken Lincolnshire racer, Guy Martin, ranted about the man-made chicanes, declaring himself "bored to the back teeth". Hours later William Dunlop flew over the front of his Tyco BMW as he crashed at York Corner in qualifying, which led to the session being red flagged for a time.
Like Martin, riders don’t care for the ignorance of outsiders or hidebound sensibilities bookended with health and safety regulations. If it takes their essential freedoms to an extreme point so be it. It’s their right to chose.
They look towards instinct and machine reliability and don’t think in conventional terms about caution. Maybe it’s counterintuitive to the calculated risk they are programming themselves to take. Fools see them as thoughtless more than whirring information processors. But they’re rarely far from thoughts of throw a leg over and rip it.
Heroic figures and sibling rivals
“It’s a run down to station corner a quarter of a mile. Top gear probably not flat out, maybe 170mph before you roll off the corner. The top guys will go close to flat out through there,” says Shoesmith.
Last year William Dunlop won the opening race of the two Superbike runs and Michael the second with an average speed of 121.358mph. One taciturn, the other bullish they are heroic figures in their northwest parish and now sibling rivals.
Nothing will change that. The Northwest is a celebration of fearless ability, not the morbid rump. With the brothers and their kind that is their life. The thrum is always there.
