Reporter John F Burns travelled to the Isle of Man specially to cover the race in which Miller narrowly missed a ?10,000 prize for the first 100mph lap by an electric bike. The article is reproduced below in full . . .

DOUGLAS, Isle of Man: As much as anything about the 2010 Isle of Man Tourist Trophy races last week that saw him emerge as the first American winner since 1984, Mark Miller remembers the chasing helicopter, its shadow following him and his battery-powered motorcycle through every heart-pumping turn on a 37.7-mile road course that racing motorcyclists regard as the sport’s most dangerous challenge.

With an on-board camera that relays live television images of the racing, the helicopter follows the bikes from high above the course. Its swoops and circles alert spectators crowding every vantage point along the way — behind low stone walls and along grassy mountainsides, in pub forecourts and family gardens, in the sleepy villages and towns that awaken every year at TT time — that the race leader is approaching.

Miller, 36, from Calabasas, Calif., described glimpsing the helicopter’s shadow — and hearing the thwack, thwack of its rotor blades, above the whistling sound that is all most electric bikes emit — as he built the lead that secured him victory in the TT’s Zero Emission race. The win was followed by a tearful moment as he stood atop the victory podium in Douglas and listened to “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

“On the electric bike, I don’t use any earplugs, and I could see that shadow and hear those blades, and all I could think was, ‘Hell, they’re following me because we’re winning this thing,’ ” Miller said. “It’s like riding a magic carpet, because you can be running at 130 miles an hour and there’s no noise, just the trees and the landscape whizzing by, and everything silent except for those helicopter blades.”

Winning on the Isle of Man was a breakthrough moment for Miller and his pioneering team, Moto Czysz of Portland, Ore., which built the electric bike.

For a racing motorcyclist, to compete — and survive — on the Isle of Man’s mountain course is the sport’s ultimate challenge. Those who follow the event rank the TT races among the most extreme of extreme sports, along with climbing Mount Everest or K2. In the 103 years since the first race was run, 231 competitors have been killed on the mountain course, 26 of them in the last 10 years, including two who died this year.

Scores of other “civilian” riders — as the organizers call the thousands of biking enthusiasts who make a pilgrimage to the island each year — have been killed trying to replicate the divine madness of the racers when the road course opens after every race.

The two-week TT gathering featured eight races in various classes, including the electric motorcycle contest. Until this year, no one had ever won more than four races in a single year, but that record fell when Ian Hutchinson, 29, of Britain, riding for Honda, won all five of his races, including the crowning event, the Senior TT race for 1,000-cc, 210-horsepower racing machines.