Bike icon John McGuinness on the rallycross and Isle of Man TT

“It’s like a giant ‘join the dots’. You have to reach every peak and be in the right position on the road. It is something that you develop as a person, there is no manual that tells you how to do it.

Rallycross isn’t McGuinness’s first taste of four-wheel motorsport. A few years ago, through his ties to Honda and Dunlop, he was invited to drive a Honda BTCC factory car at Knockhill alongside his regular driver, Gordon Shedden.

“I really enjoyed it,” he says. “Great weather, a championship winning car and all the data loggers out there. I really took the opportunity. I could have just gone there and sailed and had a good day, but I wanted it to count, so when I got there after my first session, we overlaid my data over Gordon’s and studied where he was braking, etc. thought, whatever happens, I’ll go fast.

“You definitely use more sidewalks in a car, running on it. If you were doing this on a superbike, you would be gone. I went pretty fast and then spoke to a few teams but when they mentioned the money it costs I ran the other way around.

“The car was a little asthmatic. In slow corners you would wait for it to start, as a superbike spins its rear wheel and struggles to exit. When they put 20kg of fuel in the car, I couldn’t believe the effect it had. I asked what they had done because the car was so different.