Shortly after midnight on 10 September, 2022, Davy McCartney discovered that the motorbike race he’d been organising for a year had been sabotaged.
‘The minute we turned onto the Dunbought Road, we seen it. I got out of the van and I could smell the kerosene. The whole road was swimming in it. That doesn’t wash out of the tarmac. It soaks down into the tarmac, kerosene. And it rises, and it rises. You could see where it was done for a month afterwards.’
The Mid-Antrim 150 is a 3.5-mile motorbike race that takes place on public roads, sometimes at speeds of almost 200mph, around the village of Clough in County Antrim, Northern Ireland. It’s one of eight annual road races held in a part of the UK that voted motorbike racer Joey Dunlop as its greatest ever sportsperson – over the likes of a golfer called Rory McIlroy and a footballer called George Best. England and Wales have one road race each.
It’s happened most years since 1946, but not every year. Motorbike races are fickle things.
They’re easy to sabotage, for one thing – in 2011, someone poured oil and nails over a section of the course, which stopped the race from going ahead. A police investigation failed to find a culprit.
They cost a lot of money, too, and don’t tend to make profit. In 2016, bad weather deterred the spectators from the Mid-Antrim 150, and the race had to take time out to recover. Then there was COVID, and then finally, in 2022, the race was set for its return.
They had their sponsors. They had their programmes. They had the paddock and the toilets and the health and safety people and the medical staff, and they had the hay bales set out as crash barriers and the speakers and PA systems, and timekeeping equipment and scaffolding, and cabins and flag posts.
Even the weather was sorted. ‘The riders there this year said they’d never seen a course set up that well or racing conditions that good,’ says McCartney, the Chairman of the Mid-Antrim 150 Club and Clerk of the Course. ‘Everything was right about it. Until it went wrong.’
