Hit The North: This Throttle Coil

I wasn’t raised with the hornet-rasp of Road Racing ringing in my ears.

Like anyone who grew in the North in the ‘80s and ‘90s, the Dunlops - Joey and younger brother Robert - were an unavoidable presence: holding up trophies (many trophies; many, many trophies)on sports bulletins; providing the star attraction on emphatically-titled programmes (RPM !) that tended to be broadcast on the dark side of eleven o’clock; appearing on The Kelly Show, smiling benignly, but clearly wishing they were somewhere – anywhere - else.

But for all their visibility, they (and the biking community in general) were an ongoing mystery to me. One that I spent little effort trying to solve.

Look at the crashes, at the long list of casualties. Road Racing seemed less a sport, as I understood the concept, than second cousin to one of those solstice-set folk customs that saw people chased around medieval town centres by bulls, or tumbling down steep hillsides, fracturing their shin-bones and dislocating shoulders.

The sheer euphoria with which each man’s victory was celebrated, however, should have been a hint that they enjoyed a deeper resonance. And the reactions to both men’s deaths – Joey in 2000 following a crash on a sodden track in Estonia; Robert at the NW 200 in 2008 – when the wave of( genuinely cross-community) grief was pretty much unprecedented, seemed to confirm this.

I know little about bikes. But I can say without fear of contradiction that the Dunlop brothers were loved.

And if you want to have the source of that love explained, you should make a point of seeing Road, the documentary narrated by (fellow Antrim man) Liam Neeson, which had its world premiere at this year’s Belfast Film Festival.

Taking the tragic/epic events of the '08 NW as its core tale, Directors Dermot Lavery and Michael Hewitt solder together the barely-believable stories of Joey, Robert, and Robert's sons, Michael and William, to create a film that's both a wince-inducing, dizzy-making, evocation of Road Racing's visceral, underdog, appeal, and a portrait of a remarkable, enigmatic, dynasty.

There have been whispers that this documentary is 'Senna for motorbikes’ , but the tarmac tracks of Portrush and the Isle of Man are a long way from Imola. And Ballymoney’s Dunlops – introverted, twinkly-eyed, modest - seem like unlikely soul mates for some of sport’s most ostentatious (and lavishly remunerated) playboys.

That said, the protagonists of both films do share an unrelenting competitiveness. A drive to win that placed them on a constant, race-by-race, knife-edge.

Road isn’t a film that explains why the Dunlops felt (and continue to feel) the need to put themselves through all this (although I’d pay to see what response the brilliantly bullshit-wary Michael would give when probed on the existential source of his calling). Instead it concentrates on trying to replicate what they’re experiencing during those races, and to provide an insight into the damage inflicted when all goes horrifically wrong.

On that basis it’s a thrilling, emotional, triumph: treating its audience (petrol heads and agnostics) like pillion passengers on a 180 mph lap; flooring the accelerator at the point most of us would be slamming on the breaks.

Road will receive a theatrical release in the summer.