I live on the island and been going since 2005, I would highly recommend staying here, every year I bump into people in town. Literally last year I was eating sushi next to some of the Repsol Honda team, and I passed the Marc VDS team having coffee on my way to the book shop. My friends saw Marquez having dinner at Isola Di Capri near the pier in Cowes, some people I went to school with work there and got to meet him.

The coolest encounter I had was Toni Elias in 2011, he was staying with a family who had kids in my dad’s class (My dad was a a primary school teacher at the time). Anyway dad (who speaks very broken Spanish) chatted with him and they hit it off, so we got to go into the pits on raceday to meet up with Toni and say hi, and have a look in his teams garage! Toni’s a pretty cool dude, though I doubt he’d remember me now.

Actually unbelievably my brother’s best friend was the daughter of Tito Rabat’s personal doctor. Tito was staying with them over the weekend. I never got to meet him but I thought that was pretty cool.

Either way, yeah being on the Island definitely increases your chances of meeting riders and general MotoGP people.