The study of first passage percolation (FPP) for the random interlacements model has been initiated in Andres and Prévost (Ann Appl Probab 34(2):1846–1895), where it is shown that on $$\mathbb {Z}^d$$ Z d , $$d\ge 3$$ d ≥ 3 , the FPP distance is comparable to the graph distance with high probability. In this article, we give an asymptotically sharp lower bound on this last probability, which additionally holds on a large class of transient graphs with polynomial volume growth and polynomial decay of the Green function. When considering the interlacement set in the low-intensity regime, the previous bound is in fact valid throughout the near-critical phase. In low dimension, we also present two applications of this FPP result: sharp large deviation bounds on local uniqueness of random interlacements, and on the capacity of a random walk in a ball.