A rider in the annual Tourist Trophy race, held since 1907 on the Isle of Man, leaned into a sharp corner on the twisting course.

By JOHN F. BURNS

DOUGLAS, Isle of Man - Halfway down the suburban road that descends Bray Hill, past the traffic lights, between the elementary school and rows of homes with families relaxing in their front yards, there is a barely perceptible bump.
Crouching on their 1,000-cubic-centimeter motorcycles, the race leaders hit the bump at 298 kilometers an hour, their machines rearing up like prancing horses before settling back onto the asphalt and continuing down the hill at full throttle, engines shrieking. Near the bottom they pass a 48-kilometers-perhour speed-limit sign at 315 k.p.h., then sweep out of sight.
To see the Tourist Trophy, or T.T., races on this idyllically lovely but quirky island in the Irish Sea is to watch men operating at the edge of physics, and of reason.
Daytona, Indianapolis, Le Mans, Monaco, Monza - all are better-known cathedrals of speed and risk. But nowhere are the extremes as great as on the Isle of Man, which has largely resisted a push for stricter safety measures that has all but eliminated true road racing elsewhere. Since the first Tourist Trophy race in 1907, the island has maintained the tradition, the motorcycles tearing through villages and towns on everyday public roads, achieving unimaginable speeds.
“This is the Super Bowl; this is the big show,” said Mark Miller, a graduate in aeronautical science from Long Beach, California, who was one of two Americans among the 600 riders competing in this year’s T.T. races, held each year in early June.
But with the tradition has come a grim record of deaths - 224 riders killed over the years in the Tourist Trophy races and another motorcycle event, the Manx Grand Prix, that runs on the same course in late summer. Dozens more deaths have occurred among race marshals, spectators and “civilian” riders who take to the course and try to emulate the racers’ feats.
Despite the toll, and a coroner’s report that identified major failings in track supervision after an accident last year that killed an English rider and two spectators, the Isle of Man clings proudly to the races.
Control of the races rests with the island government, which values them as a way to increase tourism; this year, the 35,000 visitors, from all over Europe, spent an estimated 16 million euros. But the days when the races were an economic mainstay are gone, as a boom in banking, financial services and manufacturing has transformed the island, which until only 20 years ago was an outpost of poverty with a declining population.
The races’ enduring value these days, apart from the astonishing spectacle, seems to lie in their sustaining influence on the island’s psyche. In the races, many of the 80,000 inhabitants say, they find affirmation of the island’s do-it-myway tradition . Many of the top riders over the decades have come from Scots- Irish stock, with a tradition, bred by history, of defying imposed authority.
“Over the decades, the Isle of Man has evolved with the T.T. races, and the races have evolved with the Isle of Man,” said Tony Brown, a businessman and the island’s chief minister . “It’s part of our culture.”