Stories from the road: A conversation with Carolynn Sells

Who is Carolynn Sells? She's the only woman to ever win a race on the Isle of Man TT Mountain Course. Seventeen years later, she still talks about it like it was something she just fancied having a go at. She's a race-school instructor, a Manx Grand Prix radio commentator, the mother of three teenage girls, and, in her own words, "just me."

Here's the thing you need to know about Carolynn before anything else: she does not think she's a big deal.

"I'm just me," she told me, early on. "If I wanna do something, I'll have a go at doing it and that's just kind of how I am."

These days, the thing she's best known as is mum. Three girls, all in high school. Their dad, Roger, her other half, is also an ex-TT racer.

The kids ride bikes. They paddleboard, ride horses, kayak. But Carolynn and Roger aren't pushy parents. And here's where the champion cracks open into something every parent will recognize. I asked if she carries the same fears for her kids that a normal parent does, or whether being so wired into speed changes the math.

"When it comes to my kids, I do," she said. "I'm a little bit guilty of being a bit of a helicopter parent at times."

She told me about a glorious summer day at the local beach, all three girls out on paddleboards, jumping off the rocks into the sea. For a little while she couldn't see them. "I was starting to panic a bit. I don't like to admit it," she said. "Something switches in a mother... you worry about everything which you didn't worry about before."

A woman who's been clocked at 175 miles an hour, sweating it out over kids on paddleboards. I told her it humanized her. She told me she also remembers exactly what she got up to at that age "I could be a bit of a tear away" so there's that running in the back of her head too.

We shifted gears to the Women Riders World Relay and the Legacy Lap she rode this year. I asked the question I ask everyone who rode it: when you're out there, who are you riding for?

Her answer reframed the whole thing.

"That legacy lap is also to commemorate all the people that we've lost on the circuit," she said. "So I'm thinking about all of them really."

She's been around this course for forty-one years, since her dad first raced when she was twelve. She's a "blow in," as they say on the island: English originally, on the Isle of Man eighteen years now, with the TT course "literally only about a mile down the road." Four decades in, she's lost teammates and friends to that mountain. When she rides the Legacy Lap, that's who's with her.

She doesn't normally do it. What got her out this year was Haley, the founder behind the WRWR who she'd grown close with long before they ever met in person. "I feel like I know her really, really well," she said, "but I never actually physically met her until this year." When Lisa came to her with the idea of a lap on the actual TT course, Carolynn made it real: she pointed them toward Sarah Maltby, the island's MP who oversees motorsport, and from there it snowballed. Norton came on board. The lap happened.

But ask her if she feels like part of the big historic moment and she gently steps out of the frame.

"I don't consider myself a woman in a man's sport," she said. "I'm just me. I was just a racer."

The barriers that weren't there

This is the part of the conversation that's stuck with me most.

Women weren't allowed to race the Manx Grand Prix until 1989, the year Carolynn turned sixteen. You'd expect that to be a defining fact of her story. 

It isn't. It barely registered.

That's the story, Carolynn never thought about being the first woman. She was just a headstrong kid who wanted to race and never once accepted the door was closed.

So I asked for the image that sticks in her head from racing…On the TT start line, there's a point past a barrier where your team can't follow you. "It's just you and the bike queuing to set off," she said. No more teammates. No more hugs. "It's just you and the road and you're getting ready to go."

Roger was her mechanic and her support in those last years. The ritual was a kiss on the helmet, a pat on the back and then she'd roll past the barrier alone. She's short, she told me, racing a 600 that was far too tall for her, legs shaking on the line with nobody left to catch her if she dropped it.

"My legs used to shake like mad," she said. "But then as soon as they drop the flag and you set off, all of that gets left at the start line."

So I asked about her best ride. "It has to be the time that I won on the TT course," she said. "I can still visualize every part of that race pretty much now, and it's seventeen years ago."

She was out front, alone, for two laps. The circuit to herself.

"There's something really magical about the TT course when you're on your own," she said. "It's like you against the world." No banging fairings with anyone. Just precision and smoothness, and, weirdly, room to notice things. A bird going over. Her brain running so fast it had spare capacity to clock a marshal flipping through his program to check her number, lap after lap.

"There he is again," she'd think, and then she'd be gone.

"I talk to myself all the time when I'm riding," she said. "I was talking to the bike, telling it not to let me down." Just keep it smooth. Hit your apex. Do this, do that. It's the same voice she now plants in her students' heads, stay left, stay left, hoping it'll echo back to them at the corners where people turn in too early and get hurt.

As an ex-instructor myself, I had to ask what she hammers home most with new riders.

She's a mother hen about it. Safe lines, safe gears, get them round in one piece. When she started, nobody taught newcomers anything "you were just told off you go and follow one of the guys with the white jackets." She's trying to be the instruction she never got.

I had to ask though, this woman who has put her time on such a legendary course, what was the one secret, the piece of knowledge she didn't want anyone to miss. Late apexes. On the TT, the corners that look like they want you to turn in are lying to you. "If you turn in too early, that's where people get into trouble." Slow in, fast out. Smooth and neat. "If you try too hard then you'll make it a lot harder."

She rides a CBR600RR now, bought about nine months ago, her favorite bike even though most of her wins came on 400s. She barely takes it out. For nearly twenty years she didn't ride on the road at all, because road racers struggle to separate the two worlds and she didn't trust herself not to come into a blind corner on the wrong side of the road. Now the kids are old enough to leave at home on a Saturday, so she sneaks off to instruct and rides there and back.

There are no speed limits on parts of the island. She's careful anyway.

"The CBR, you can be doing a hundred mile an hour in second gear," she said. She'll overtake a couple of cars, glance down, and she's at 110 without trying.

For context: her fastest ever clocked on the TT course was 175.2 mph. On the 600.

So what's next? I figured there'd be a new quest. Hell, I said, it could be quilting for all I know.

Not quilting. (Though one daughter crochets.) But maybe hockey, which she played as a kid.  Definitely kayaking, the Isle of Man is thirty miles long, thirteen wide, and ringed with places she'd love to see from the water. And a parachute jump she's wanted to do forever.

Here's the thing, though. When she got to the parachute jump, she hedged. "I'm kind of tipping over that other side where I maybe lost my bottle a little bit."

I couldn't let that slide.

"This interview started with you telling me you don't see barriers," I said, "and I'm meeting a very different person right now who suddenly sees some."

She laughed. "I would love to try though. Definitely love to."

For the record: if Carolynn Sells ever takes that jump, American Moto Co is covering it.

Takeaways

For new riders: Build the voice in your helmet. Repeating the skills you learned in class only makes you a better rider. Dont let them disappear on the road. 

For experienced riders: Speed is a skill you build, not a switch you flip. She went from a 125-mph VFR400 to 175 on the Mountain Course over years, because the brain has to learn to process that fast before the bike can. Respect the ladder.

For all of us: The barrier you refuse to see can't stop you. Carolynn never accepted "women don't do this," so it never slowed her down. Headstrong isn't a flaw. Sometimes it's the whole engine.