The First Female-Led Legacy Lap at the Isle of Man TT (A follow up)
- Zach Janik
- Jun 18
- 7 min read
For the first time, women led the Isle of Man TT Legacy Lap. They rolled out of the grandstand at half nine on Sunday, May 31, a front row of record holders, racers, adventurers, and the woman who dreamed the whole thing up, but behind them came fourteen miles of motorcycles. The police counted. Locals called it the biggest Legacy Lap they could remember.
All along the 37.73-mile Mountain Course, the people of the Isle of Man had come out to line the roads, and a remarkable number of them were girls. Holding banners. Waving. Cheering for a row of women they’d never met.
“I made sure I looked at each one of them and I waved back,” says Liza Miller, co-CEO of the Women Riders World Relay. “I could picture myself being that little kid looking up and going, ‘Wow, I want to do that someday.’”
Lisa Brain saw the same thing from the very front of the pack. The Manx woman who built this event still gets emotional describing the busiest stretches of the course… “hundreds of people lining the course, waving, little children holding banners up,” cheering for Carolynn Sells, cheering for all the ladies. If she could grab every internet skeptic who’d spent six months insisting this ride didn’t need to happen, that’s exactly where she’d put them: right there in the hedges, to see the impact this was having.
A quick word, if you’re new here…
If you haven’t heard of the Isle of Man TT, it’s the famously dangerous race where, instead of a closed circuit, riders fling themselves down public roads lined with stone walls and hedges at north of 200 mph.
The Legacy Lap is the gentler cousin: a speed-controlled, open-roads ride-out around the full Mountain Course, open to the whole community. It started in 2014 as a memorial, the Simon Andrews Lap, and grew into a rolling tribute to everyone who’s shaped these roads. (Background via the Isle of Man TT.)
Women have always been part of that history. This year simply put them out front, leading the parade.
If you read our earlier story on Lisa Brain, you heard the story of the woman who took an idea to reality: proudly Manx, first road license in 2011 after a friend dared her into it, four boys raised. What you might not know is that this whole history-making event began as a small idea over coffee, a notion to showcase a few local female riders, and grew, conversation by conversation with island officials, into something that changed history.
It nearly ate her alive getting there. Literally...Lisa told me she didn’t eat for three days beforehand. She had no real idea how many women would show, “100 maybe,” she’d been telling people, and she was off by hundreds. She was riding a borrowed Norton Dominator 99 with a backwards, one-up-three-down gearbox she’d never touched. And she was carrying the weight of every comment that had piled up online telling her none of it mattered.
Then the flag dropped, she tucked in behind Carolynn Sells, and the island answered the question for her. “I was crying in my helmet,” she says of those first corners. “It was that moment that it all came together, we pulled it off. We were there and we were doing it, and there were people supporting it.”
When the Nortons rolled back in at the finish, her four boys were standing there waiting. They came in and watched the presentations. “I felt incredibly proud,” she says, “to show them what you can do.” Ask her what success looks like now and she won’t mention the record turnout. She’ll tell you it’s how her boys are turning out. She’ll tell you she’s been to the bottom, clawed up to the top, and slid back to the bottom again, and that none of it matters next to those four.
Here’s where the diversity of this thing stops being a buzzword and turns into a roll call of who, exactly, was up there.
Carolynn Sells, still the first and only woman ever to win a solo race around the Mountain Course, which she did in 2009 at better than 106 mph, rode the brand-new Norton Manx R. Guliafshan Tariq, “Gul,” came from a place where women aren’t handed the keys; she once rode solo from Britain all the way to Pakistan, and now she was helping lead a parade in front of thousands. Gloria Perrin and Gail Sheely, racers from an earlier age, rode machines from the 1920s. WRWR founder Hayley Bell rode a Norton Atlas, and gave the closing speech at the motorcycle museum with her toddler, Naya, on her hip, juggling a squirming little girl while making history with the other hand.
And they’d come from everywhere. Erin Sills, a land speed record holder, flew in from San Francisco. Ruth Belcher, founder of Global Moto Adventures, came from Seattle, one of ten Americans who made the trip. Liza Miller came from California.
Then there’s Amanda Knapp, who gathered most of the interviews you’re reading, and who rode herself. By day she’s a dean in Maryland; on weekends she’s #334, a competitive dirt racer who grew up chasing her dad through the woods of rural West Virginia on a KTM 300 XC-W, all rocks and roots and gnarly hill climbs. The Legacy Lap was her first time ever on an adventure bike: she picked up a BMW R1250 GS in London. When she pulled up to the starting line in front of the grandstands, she stood up on the pegs, threw both hands in the air, and made herself catalog all five senses, what the air smelled like, what it sounded like, what it tasted like, because “I really did not want to forget that moment,” she says, “every single aspect of it.”
Erin Sills will tell you the one thing she fought the entire lap was the urge to crack the throttle coming over the bridges. You can, she kept thinking. You really could. Ruth rode for the ten Americans and for her late friend, the racing pioneer Mary McGee. And Amanda carried Mary too… literally. Tucked in her pocket the whole trip was Mary’s handkerchief, given to her by Mary’s family at the memorial. McGee was the first woman to race competitively in the United States and the first person, man or woman, to ride the Baja 500 solo. Two women, a generation apart in age and an ocean apart in home, both rode this lap so Mary would be on it.
The reason these women were all connected was through the Women Riders World Relay, which runs on three words: connect, challenge, change. It began in 2019 and linked more than 20,000 women across 102 countries in its first relay; the goal is nothing smaller than every woman rider on earth. On the morning of the lap you could watch all three words doing their work at once....
Connect: Amanda felt it land hardest when she was sitting at a table of women from Bulgaria, New Zealand and all over the globe. These were friends she’d made by tapping phones to pass the relay’s virtual baton and watching the globe light up. Somewhere between the wine and the stories, time froze on her. “How is this little girl from West Virginia sitting at the Isle of Man with the most remarkable women from around the world?” she remembers thinking, chills running up her arms. These were solo riders who’d crossed continents alone. And here they all were at one table. “We are more similar than we are different,” she says. Connection, she’ll tell you, is an understatement.
Challenge: was quieter and more honest. Half the battle, as Liza tells it, was simply getting there, the time off, the rented bike, the borrowed nerve, the talking-the-family-into-it. Erin felt it too: the appeal of the whole WRWR, she says, is that it asks you to do the thing you’re not sure you can do, and then you show up and you can. For Amanda the challenge was the bike under her, trading single-track and mud for a heavyweight adventure tourer on foreign tarmac, on the opposite side of the road, in gusting UK rain.
Change: is the historic shift. For over a century this race had never been led by women. As Liza put it: “Never been featured, never been the focus, never been applauded as they went by just for being women riders.” Until this year.
So if you’re reading this and wondering whether it’s your turn:
For new riders: Lisa didn’t get her road license until she was a mother of four. Amanda didn’t enter her first race until 34. Late start, small bike, new discipline, doesn’t matter. Go ride.
For experienced riders: Ruth got chills in her mirror. Amanda’s a hardened racer who got emotional over a dinner table. The wonder doesn’t have to wear off. Don’t let it.
For all of us: This entire thing, fourteen miles of bikes, a place in the history books, kids who’ll remember it for life, started with one woman asking a question in a coffee shop. Dare to ask. You might be the tipping point for everybody around you.
Before you go
Lisa’s still at it, by the way, quieter now, through her charity work and her Manx Biker Girl posts, advocating for women a little at a time. She’s a trustee for GlobalARRK, a charity supporting “stuck parents,” trapped overseas by international custody disputes.
I’ll leave it on the line that both Ruth and Amanda carried up that mountain, the one they borrowed from Mary McGee: say yes to life.
Every woman at the front of that lap did. In fact, fourteen miles of riders did.
Sources beyond our own interviews: Isle of Man TT (iomttraces.com), Motorcycle News, 3FM Isle of Man, and Yahoo/Norton Motorcycles coverage of the 2026 Legacy Lap for race history, turnout, and rider records. All rider quotes are from American Moto Co. interviews conducted by Amanda Knapp and Zach Janik.
