8 riders...fark. Speaking of IOM Lazmo, I bumped into Shaun Harris on the foreign forums a few years back and convinced him (not sure how) to come over in 2011/12 I think it was. Fwiw he's won IOM 3x.
He came over for a decent year or so staying with a racing buddy and basically mentoring him in exchange for rent, I picked up what I could here and there but the guy is intense, he lives and breathes racing. There's nothing else but racing (except family), and there's def no backchat.
Doubt it's a surprise but the thing I noticed the most was where I'd try and analyse and optimise something on track his approach was "What's the problem, just do it." That's def the mindset of confidence, and comes with being a 3x world champ and certified nutter I guess. For example, he only raced occasionally that I saw, but the first time was when he borrowed someone's streetbike ( that was 9yrs old at the time) w/street tyres, entered in the F2 600s ,muscled the POS around and won the race comfortably, it was too easy for him, and he hadn't ridden for almost 5years at the time. He probably didn't qualify either to save the tyres, I can't remember. He had an acco after returning to racing in NZ a few months back and is slowly recovering. But an interesting and determined fellow, that's for sure.