Kiwi TT ace Mitch Rees: ‘I’m just a mechanic…a weirdo from Whakatāne who just enjoys riding bikes’
Just weeks after riding through a 'war zone' at the Northwest 200, the Kiwi racer is ready to put mind, body and soul on the line at the Isle of Man TT
By Kent Gray
The tarmacked paddock under the shadow of the imposing TT Grandstand in Douglas sprawls upwards of three hectares. That’s four full sized rugby fields alive to the hum of focused humans and generators powering everything from man-in-a-van to motorhome glam setups.
It’s an intimate and egalitarian environ and, unlike most modern motorsport paddocks, remarkably accessible to the public. Fans can get closer to the bikes, riders and mechanics here than almost anywhere else in world motorsport, the kind of proximity that would be unthinkable at a F1 Grand Prix or a MotoGP round.
RELATED: Everything you need to know about Mitch Rees’ TT fortnight
There’s an inner sanctum that’s much harder to penetrate, of course. It’s a place where the riders and their nearest and dearest chill after sessions and at night, long after the fans migrate from the side of the Isle’s fabled roads into the local pubs.
The banter in both places, especially after the sun goes down, is legendary. One lubricates legend, the other is the place of actual human examples debriefing the day’s racing in intimate detail with fellow riders and mechanics.
The Final Sector is calling into Mitch Rees’ temporary sanctuary from Auckland. He’s in the process of setting up camp next to TT alphas Davey Todd and Pete Hickman and we’re mindful of being a new road racing publication introducing ourselves at about the worst time possible, encroaching on the Kiwi ace’s precious time at the most important event of the year.
“It’s all good, mate. I’m just some f…… mechanic from Whakatāne,” he says with a friendly laugh.
That’s the thing you quickly ascertain about Rees. He actually means it. By day, he fixes bikes at the Team Rees Motorcycles dealership in the Bay of Plenty and when time and finances permit, he fangs it around the world with the swiftest street racers on two wheels.
You don’t win fastest solo newcomer honours at the TT, as Rees did last year, without immense talent but the 33-year-old is about as unassuming as they come, the epitome of the laid-back sports stars New Zealanders like to put on pedestals.
If he were a rugby player, he’d be headline news, fending off endless interview requests. In reality, he’s the kind of Kiwi who kicks about with the rich and famous and thinks nothing of it.
Last week, before he caught the ferry across from Heysham, he stayed a couple of nights at John McGuinness’s place in Morecambe. The “ranch”, or “stronghold” as Rees called it.
Take your pick. And then just let that land for a second.
McGuinness has 23 TT wins, third on the all-time list behind Michael Dunlop and Dunlop’s uncle Joey. He jointly holds the record for the most Senior TT wins – seven – with Mike ‘The Bike’ Hailwood. And Mitch Rees, humble mechanic from Whakatāne, slept at his house before the biggest fortnight on the racing calendar.
That’s the stuff of dreams, isn’t it. Knocking about with the Morecambe Missile himself?
“Yeah I guess so…but I met him in 2024 when I came over here and surprised Davey, Davey’s really close with him as well, and he’s just John, really sound,” Rees says.
“He’d come up at events like [BSB rounds] Oulton Park and Donington and he’s like ‘how’s it all going?’ He’s just a guy who genuinely loves motorcycle racing, much like my dad does. He’s just into bikes. For me it’s more of a friendship than like, ‘Oh, it’s John McGuinness.”
This is who Mitch Rees is. The world keeps trying to make him remarkable, and he keeps pointing out that he’s just a bloke who likes going fast on motorbikes.
“Like, I find it weird when people are, “Oh, can I have your autograph?” I’m like, ‘I’m just a weirdo from Whakatāne that works on ATVs and side-by-sides and just enjoys riding bikes.’ You know… I’m just Mitch.”
Full Throttle Pedigree
Don’t be fooled by the humility. “Just Mitch” happens to be a decorated member of one of New Zealand road racing’s royal families. Three-time NZSBK champion, five-time Suzuki International Series winner, serial conqueror of Whanganui’s Cemetery Circuit. Vernon Cooper Trophy winner at the 2025 TT.
Tony Rees paved the way, winning just about everything there is to win in Kiwi motorcycling. Three premier Superbike titles himself, the last of them in 2017 – 12 years and a legal wrangle after his previous win in 2005.
He raced with top 10 results in Australia, Japan, Malaysia and Belgium and the TT came calling more than once but he turned it down, a new business and young family trumping the lure of the Mountain course as much as he must have yearned for the island in the Irish Sea.
Instead, Tony built the family business. He watched his sons Mitch and the late Damon grow up and excel around bikes. And when Mitch’s TT campaign became real, he packed his tools and got on a plane.
He is now his son’s mechanic, embedded in the Milenco by Padgett’s Racing Team. Pre-season testing in Spain, BSB rounds, the Northwest 200 — Tony Rees has been there, hands on the Hondas, a sounding board for Mitch, every step of the way.
Earlier this year, they came to the island together on a recce. Four or five days, driving laps of the Mountain Course in a hire car, Mitch talking his father through every metre of it. What gear here. Watch this curb there. Stay right through this section. The left-hander at Ballacrye — it looks fast, and it is fast, fifth or sixth gear, and then there’s a jump, 30 feet in the air, and while you’re airborne you need to be thinking about Quarry Bends already.
Tony soaked it in. All of it.
“He was like, ‘Right, I want you to do a full lap and, like, talk me through it.’ I was like, ‘Yep, sweet. No drama. So I’m talking him through it…just all those little key things.
“I’d spent so much time learning it, hundreds and hundreds of laps on the video game and hours of watching YouTube laps and then last year when I came over, I spent a week over here and I did 20-odd laps in the car as well.
“He was quite impressed that, like, ‘Oh, shit, you’ve, done your homework and you know what you’re talking about. You’re not just going out and riding around 60 kilometres of racetrack.’”
Coming from Tony Rees, who knows exactly the physical and mental toll of six laps on a purpose-built track, much less three to six laps of a 60.72km street circuit, that’s not a small thing to say.
Mum Vicki is on the island too. So is Mitch’s wife, Mihi. The whole crew, parked up in the motorhome zone as practice week begins.
“I’m very fortunate with the relationship I’ve got with my parents and my dad,” Rees says. “A lot of people don’t have that, let alone having that and going racing.
“It’s just like when you’re a kid growing up and I guess it’s sort of kept rolling on and we just enjoy hanging out and spending time to each other.”
He says it plainly, without sentimentality. Just a fact he holds dear.
Road to the Island
The travelling family dynamic has been important because the lead up to the 115th Isle of Man TT hasn’t been without its challenges.
The two British Superbike Championship rounds Rees rode were purely for preparation — controlled, and ridden with one eye already on the ferry. At Oulton Park, the first BSB round, he fell in qualifying, started from deep on the grid and rode conservatively through the race. Oulton Park was where fellow Kiwi Shane Richardson was killed at the same event last year. Rees knew that. Everyone knew that.
“All the TT boys, we were riding around in a group,” he says of the most recent round at Donington Park. “Just, ‘we want to get through this and get to the TT.’ You’re not wanting to take too much risk. You’ve waited 12 months to get back here.”
The famous Northwest 200 between Oulton Park and Donington was a topsy-turvy week emotionally. It started with something no one who was there will forget quickly.
A Czech rider, Kamil Holan, was killed in a practice accident. Rees rolled through the scene moments after it happened.
“The accident on the Thursday, that sort of scared me a bit, just with everything that I’d seen when I rode through. It was it was pretty horrific,” he says quietly.
“That makes it all the more real. The dust was still settling as I came down through there. Yeah…right through a war zone, effectively.”
Like every other rider, Rees just had to find a way to park the sobering scene and race on. He did, somehow, and the results were, in his own words, “awesome” and “surprising.”
On the Supersport CBR600 — a bike he hadn’t raced properly since 2017, a class he’d done almost nothing in for eight years — he finished 6th after starting 21st on the grid. He was 10th in the Superstock and rattled off 12th and 15th places in the Superbike races, all great intel for the TT.
“The Northwest results went really well this year. Surprised is probably a little bit of the way to sort of say it… just with [seeing the aftermath of the accident], I didn’t feel the greatest.
“I was probably a little bit taken back, a little bit... just needed to process it. Yeah, just one of them.”
Every street racer knows the risk but you can’t dwell on it. Still, when it’s right there in front of you, it’s confronting. Sometimes, the words are hard to find.
Flat Out. No Excuses
The question of why a person does this, why they willingly point a 220-horsepower motorcycle at a public road and go flat out past stone walls and risk it all on the edge of a mountain for 37¾ miles, doesn’t have a clean answer. The TT has been asking it of riders for over a century.
Rees gives it a try anyway.
“I guess for a lot of riders, it’s a drug. They want to be here and race around flat out.”
Is it a drug for you?
“No, I don’t need to do it, but I enjoy doing it, and I enjoy riding bikes. But if next year it’s too difficult, not financially feasible — it’s expensive to come here and do the job properly, it costs a fortune — I won’t sell everything to make it happen. I’m not that desperate.”
Most riders in this paddock would never say that out loud. The TT tends to attract a particular kind of obsession. Todd said everything feels less after you’ve done a TT. “Everything in life”.
Rees hasn’t thought about much else all year but he’s also wired differently. He loves it. He’s very good at it. But if the numbers stop working, he’ll stop.
It’s oddly reassuring.
What the TT does give him, when you press him on it, is something harder to put a price on.
“I guess it’s just the thrill and the experience and the accomplishment of finishing a lap,” he says.
“Just completing a lap is a big deal because it’s obviously a pretty gnarly place to ride around, the speeds are so fast. It’s what every motorcyclist ever wants to do is go flat out on open roads, isn’t it? That’s effectively what I’m getting to do.”
The Team & The Machines
Clive Padgett doesn’t normally take on newcomers. He took one on last year, and that newcomer won a trophy. He’s back for the famous Batley-based team, once home to 12-time TT winning Kiwi Bruce Anstey.
Two Hondas. The CBR600RR in Supersport. The CBR1000RR-R in Superstock, Superbike, and the Senior TT — the main event, the open-class race, the one that was cancelled by wind last year before Rees got a chance to start it. A mechanical cut short his debut race in the only other Superbike start too so getting a result on the big bike, cracking the 130mph mark, is a quiet goal.
He comes back knowing things the newcomer version of himself couldn’t have known — not just the circuit, though that’s deeper now too, but the bike at specific points.
What it does through the jump at Ballacrye. How the front comes up in fourth and fifth and sixth gear on Sulby Straight. What it costs you physically over the Ginger Hall to Ramsey section, where the road is so violent you ride standing on the pegs for two minutes because sitting down means you literally cannot see.
“If you sit down on the seat, you’re just getting bucked around, and you literally, physically cannot see because of the vibration. Your brain’s getting juggled around. Your eyes are getting juggled around your head. All you literally see is a grey blur of the road and the curbs. And then you see a green blur, which is the trees…”
Knowing what’s coming, does that make it better or worse this time?
“It makes it better, for sure. You know, it’s a funny one. Like, a lot of guys, they’re all in, they’ll do the homework and stuff like that. Do one lap, and they go, ‘No, it’s not for me.’ They pull the pin.
“They just go, ‘This is f….. stupid. It’s mental.’ Yeah, everyone wants to do it but I don’t know that anyone wants to do it in race condition. But for me, it’s nice coming in this year and knowing, okay, I know what the bike’s going to do in key places. So you’re not having to learn that, and it takes a lot of the unknown away.”
Flying Kiwi
Free practice starts Monday, 9.45pm NZT for those with a TT+ Live pass. Racing begins on Saturday with the showcase Senior TT on Saturday week.
The motorhome is parked on a sealed strip of tarmac on a small island in the Irish Sea, and outside it the weather is forecast to hold for at least the first week of practice and qualifying which will make a nice change from last year.
Davey Todd, Pete Hickman and the Morecambe Missile are nearby. They’ve passed on nuggets. Tony Rees has the makeshift tented garage for the #29 bike running shipshape. Mihi and Mum are there for every heart-stopping moment too.
Mitch Rees — mechanic from Whakatāne, TT newcomers award winner, the flying Kiwi — is ready.
The Final Sector is covering the 2025 Isle of Man TT throughout race fortnight. Watch for our companion piece: “A lap of the Isle of Man TT in Mitch Rees’ own words”. That’ll drop on Saturday to help get you in the mood for race week.