The Heartwarming Story of John Hinds

If you spend enough time around motorsport, you learn to live with danger. But road racing in Northern Ireland and the Isle of Man isn’t the tidy, padded version of danger you see on short circuits. It’s raw. It’s fast. It’s real. Riders race at 150 mph past hedges, stone walls and telegraph poles that haven’t moved in a century. Most people know the Isle of Man TT — the world’s most famous test of nerve — but fewer outside the paddock realise that Northern Ireland has its own fierce road racing scene: Cookstown, Tandragee, Armoy, Skerries, Dundrod, the North West 200. Public roads closed for racing. Unforgiving courses. Brave men and women leaning into bends you wouldn’t attack in a hire car at 30 mph.

It’s thrilling. It’s terrifying. And for many years, at the back of every starting grid, sat one man who made the whole thing feel a little less like rolling the dice with your life.

That man was John Hinds.

When the flag dropped, the riders launched, and John launched after them. Not at touring pace. Not casually. Flat out. He rode a superbike loaded with trauma gear, pushing to stay as close to the pack as possible so that if someone crashed, he could be there within seconds. Not minutes. Seconds. His job was to race the racers so he could reach them faster than anyone else alive. And everyone in the sport knew it.

Many competitors quietly said they would refuse to race if John wasn’t behind them. Having him there was like wearing an invisible shield. The riders accepted the danger — it’s part of the sport — but knowing John was shadowing them gave them something precious: a chance. If the worst happened, he would arrive in a blur of red leathers and orange trauma bags and try to drag them back from the brink.

John’s path to that role began in Newtownards in 1980. He grew up close enough to circuits that the sound of racing felt like weather. He became a doctor, then an anaesthetist and intensive care consultant — brilliant, calm, sharp as a scalpel — but racing never left his bloodstream. Eventually, he found the perfect way to combine both worlds: become a “flying doctor”, one of the medics who cover Irish road races from the saddle of a superbike.

From that point, stories followed him everywhere. A rider with no pulse at the side of a damp road, brought back because John arrived almost instantly. Another, broken at the base of a hedge, stabilised so expertly that surgeons later said, “The first ten minutes saved him”. You won’t find all their names written anywhere — privacy and John’s modesty saw to that — but you can see their faces at paddocks today. Alive. Upright. Laughing.

He brought the same skill to hospitals. He was a world-class trauma educator: wickedly funny, painfully honest, completely committed to making difficult medicine make sense. His talks — “More cases from the races” and “Crack the chest: get crucified” — became legend. He could have filled a career with conferences and titles. Instead, he spent his weekends blasting along country roads behind people he cared about, trying to outpace fate.

And then there was the helicopter.

Northern Ireland was the only part of the UK without a dedicated air ambulance. John had seen too many patients suffer because of that gap. So he fought for change. He met ministers, explained the stakes, and pushed relentlessly between night shifts and race weekends. He didn’t care about politics. He cared about seconds — because seconds save lives.

Then came Skerries, 3 July 2015.

John was doing what he always did: providing medical cover from the back of a powerful bike. He crashed, struck a pole and was flown to Beaumont Hospital in Dublin. He died the next day, aged 35.

The paddock fell silent. Riders who never blinked at danger cried. Marshals who had stood beside tragedy for decades bowed their heads. Medical teams across the world paid tribute to a man who had changed emergency care on the world’s most dangerous roads.

What happened next says everything about him.

John’s wife, Janet, carried on his campaign. Thousands joined her. Politicians who once hesitated now moved mountains. Funding for Northern Ireland’s first Helicopter Emergency Medical Service was announced on what would have been John’s 36th birthday.

When that helicopter lifted for the first time, it did so with the callsign “Delta 7” — John’s own radio tag. In spirit and purpose, that aircraft is him. Every life it saves is another fight he wins.

And so the paddock reaches for big, impossible phrases to explain the impossible. They say John Hinds was the man who single-handedly raced the Grim Reaper — and won. They say he was the only man who ever rode faster than the devil.

You can picture it easily. The devil crouched at the exit of a fast bend, ready to collect his usual harvest — and suddenly John appears, flat out, red leathers glowing, shouting, “Not today, mate”, as he rockets past in a streak of noise and courage.

In the end, death caught him, as it catches us all. But look around.

There is a helicopter in the sky over Northern Ireland because of him.
There are riders who walked away because he reached them in seconds.
There are young medics who learned courage from his words.
There is a sport that is safer — still dangerous, always dangerous — but safer, because John refused to accept anything less.

John Hinds lived fast, cared deeply and laughed loudly. His life was an emotional rollercoaster — fierce joy, deep compassion, impossible bravery, crushing loss, and then the joy again of seeing what grew from the seeds he planted.

Written by: Paul Pearce