Motorcycle Racing Sport

Motorcycle racing, the recreational and competitive use of motorcycles, a sport practiced by both professionals and amateurs on roads, tracks, closed circuits, and natural terrain.

The development of motorcycling largely paralleled and often coincided with the development of automobile sports. There was a class for motorcycles in many of the old town-to-town automobile road races, the Paris-Vienna race, for example. The de Dion tricycle dominated the sport in 1897, but two-wheelers like the Werner soon set the stage for an entirely different form of racing. In 1904 the Fédération Internationale du Motocyclisme (renamed the Fédération Internationale Motocycliste [FIM] in 1949) created the international cup, uniting five nations: Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, and Britain. The first international cup race took place in 1905 at Dourdan, France. The race for the Tourist Trophy (TT) became the most famous of all European motorcycle races, however. The first TT race took place in 1907 on the Isle of Man, on a course that was the world’s most famous for many decades thereafter.