Dunlop on the podium despite admitting his Honda CBR “can’t be fixed” this week

Michael Dunlop finished third in Sunday’s Superbike TT. He was, by his own admission, “quite surprised” to be on the podium at all.

That says everything about where Dunlop’s 2026 TT campaign currently sits, and quietly says quite a lot about the state of independent racing at the Mountain Course more broadly.

The Ballymoney man had originally planned to run a Ducati Panigale V4 R in the Superbike class this year. That project got shelved in the weeks before the event, and Dunlop reverted to the Honda CBR1000RR-R – the same machine he used to set his personal-best lap around the 37.73-mile circuit. A familiar tool, then, but not one that’s been behaving itself. Practice week was troubled, setup issues have carried over into race week, and Dunlop was blunt about the outlook: “We can’t do much to solve it.”

There’s a further complication. Dunlop is splitting manufacturers across the big-bike classes, Honda for the Superbike, BMW for Superstock. That lack of continuity matters. It fragments data, fragments setup rhythm, and fragments the kind of week-on-week feel that helps a rider dial a bike in under pressure. When the factory teams are rolling in with months of electronics development and a hard drive full of setup data already sorted, that gap becomes very difficult to close on race week alone.

And yet. He still finished third, behind Dean Harrison and Peter Hickman, the names you’d expect to be fighting for those rostrum spots with properly supported packages behind them.

Last-minute changes and unconventional calls have never seemed to rattle Dunlop the way they might rattle anyone else. Over the years it has almost become part of how he operates. But the Superbike class in 2026 is a different proposition. Tiny setup gains translate into significant time across a lap this long, and the factory-backed operations have narrowed the margin for old-school adaptability considerably.

Which is precisely why that podium deserves a second look. Unresolved bike issues, a manufacturer switch abandoned weeks out, a split setup programme across classes, and he still stood on the rostrum at the biggest road race on the planet.