Michael Dunlop has admitted that his lack of preparation time for the 2026 Isle of Man TT on the Honda machinery he’s racing in the superbike class has so far hurt him, after a disappointing run to third in the opening race of the week.

In Sunday's race, Dean Harrison was almost unassailable for the win, and Peter Hickman was able to eventually triumph in a close race-long battle with Dunlop for second.

The most successful TT racer of all time came into this year’s event flirting with Ducati’s V4 Panigale superbike machine, off the back of a successful 2025 where he handed the Italian brand its first wins in 30 years in the supersport class.

But after making the last-minute decision that the Ducati wasn’t quite ready yet for road racing, and having been forced to revert to the Honda machinery that he fought for wins on 12 months ago, Dunlop exclusively told The Race afterwards that he just hasn’t had the time to get the bike working the way he wanted it to.

“There's nobody else to blame but myself here,” he explained. “Just with the lack of time, what happened, and stuff out of my hands.

“I can assure you for the future, we can't keep coming like this here and say it's not quite good to go, because you're not showing your true self and your speed.

“My speed's there, and I know what I can do.

“But it's up to us to do something better to a degree, and at the minute we know it's not good enough. It's not giving me that feeling. You can see it - the boys just said to me while watching it, it was horrific to watch.

“The bike's just not doing anything that I want it to do and I'm working far too hard, and with that it's not good.

“Dean's riding bikes he's been here on the last two years, and he rides them well; they do a bit of speed. I've done no laps on the bike, and there's a lot of stuff come up.

“Probably if we had done a lot of tests beforehand we would have known this, but at the end of the day, it's just the way it is.”

Though he was forced to settle for a podium finish in the opening race of the weekend, Dunlop is still confident that there’ll still be opportunities to extend his win record on the smaller bikes - even if this might not be his year on superbike and likely superstock machinery given Harrison’s pace.

“That's life,” the normally taciturn Dunlop admitted, “and we have to sit down, gather what's going on, and listen.

“We've got a good idea where the issue's coming from and it's just finding it. We just can't get away from it at the minute.

“You go from being about three seconds off the Supersport lap record, breaking the twin lap record and being about 50 seconds off the superbike.

“I haven't lost it just yet, so there's obviously something hanging over us.

“It's just that we haven't got a package at the minute to play games with, so it's just the way it is.

“But we've got a long week yet, we've got a lot more races to come, and hopefully we can try and work on something and try and make it better.

“But it's not good enough where we're at at the minute, that's for sure.”