Oscar Piastri has seen plenty of speed up close in Formula 1, but even he sounded slightly stunned this week after a detour into one of motorsport’s most uncompromising arenas: the Isle of Man TT.
With the F1 circus fresh from Canada, Piastri and manager Mark Webber stopped off at the Mountain Course, the 37-mile ribbon of closed public roads that turns the island into a high-speed maze of walls, hedges and blind crests. It’s a world away from the wide run-offs and engineered margins of a modern grand prix circuit — and that contrast was the whole point.
Webber posted a clip of Piastri stationed roadside, tucked behind a wall as a bike flashes past at full noise, the rider apparently lifting the front wheel over one of the course’s notorious jumps. Piastri turns to Webber with the sort of look you normally see from an F1 driver when they’ve just watched onboard footage from another category and realised, in real time, that the laws of self-preservation are being interpreted differently.
“Always a privilege taking people for their first time to the @ttracesofficial,” Webber wrote on Instagram. “Never fails to impress them the display of sheer courage.”
Piastri, in his own video, captured the other side of the TT experience: the strangely casual, almost sneaky pilgrimage required to get a “good spot” when the racetrack is effectively an island’s road network. He filmed himself threading through narrow gaps between fences, admitting he was walking through someone’s garden because, as he put it, “apparently this is *the* spot to watch.”
Then the bikes arrived, and the tone shifted.
“I don’t know what I was expecting, but this wasn’t it,” he said, before later summing it up with the kind of blunt honesty you tend to get from drivers when they’re genuinely impressed: “These guys are nuts.”
It’s an easy line to laugh at, but it’s also revealing. F1 drivers spend their lives calibrating risk — judging braking points within millimetres, managing tyre limits, committing to corners where the penalty for hesitation is usually time, not trauma. The TT exists on a different scale. The skill is obvious, but what lands first is the proximity: the noise hits you in the chest, the speed arrives without warning, and the consequences are written into the scenery. A metre or two from a rider at full chat, a wall in front of you, a hedge behind you — it doesn’t feel like spectating so much as briefly sharing the same piece of peril.
Piastri hinted it won’t be a one-off, saying it “won’t be the last” time he visits. He also posted pictures from the paddock and clips closer to the start line, chatting with riders and soaking up the event from the inside, not just the roadside.
This year’s TT began on Monday, with practice and qualifying runs underway through the week ahead of the time trial races across different classes over the weekend. The scale of what they’re doing is best understood in numbers: a lap is two-and-a-half times the length of the Nürburgring, and it’s stitched together from cambered public roads, villages and open stretches that reward commitment in a way F1 simply doesn’t ask of anyone anymore.
The current lap record belongs to Peter Hickman, set in 2023 on a BMW M1000RR at an average of 136.358mph around the Mountain Course — a statistic that never quite sounds real, no matter how many times you hear it.
For Webber, it also looked like a reminder of why he’s always loved the raw end of racing: the bits without the polish, without the layers of systems and safeguards, where bravery and precision sit uncomfortably close together. For Piastri, it was something else again — not inspiration in the cliché sense, but perspective. In F1, danger is managed, packaged, scrutinised. On the Isle of Man, it’s right there in the open, and the sport asks you to look at it without blinking.
Piastri did. Then he shook his head, and said what most first-timers say — only with an F1 driver’s authority behind it.
