Vee-Four Velocity

Meet my new office… the 2015 Honda VFR800. As an office it’s rubbish; no water cooler, no constantly updating laptop, no witty colleagues or preening alpha males. No cup holders, no sat nav, no Bluetooth or massage seats. Crazy.

Apparently we no longer need to go to meetings in Weybridge, Colnbrook, Bourne End and Hinckley. Some new-fangled technology called FaceSkype or some such means we can spend even longer sat in front of a screen and talk to marketing people in the Home Counties while scratching our out-of-sight hairy-dudes beneath the table. Doing this saves on the requirement to queue in a car for eight hours, to take part in a two-hour meeting, drink over-priced coffee and crash on the way home through exhaustion.

I have a better suggestion. Buy a VFR800 and get to the meetings in record time instead. My working life currently consists of many meetings in some Counties a long way from Home. A long and very dull plod from the Wolds to Woking is made considerably more entertaining by the addition of Honda’s VTEC.

The VFR is brilliant on these long slogs. The seat stays comfy for three hours, it does an easy 200 miles per tank and is as accomplished slicing through traffic as it is in stealth mode, being fast and polite when the traffic thins.

To relieve the boredom on the many motorway miles, I’ve developed a new game through the variable speed limit zones – those gantried sections of road that seem to cover half the network these days. In rush hour they genuinely seem to keep the traffic flowing, which is brilliant, but most of the time that I’m in them the traffic has vanished but the lights are still on – a bit like setting the timer to run too late on your central heating. I find these stretches dangerous.

My concentration drops away really quickly, so I’ve developed a solution... Drop down to second gear – keeping the engine just above where the VTEC kicks in – and accelerate away from the gantry as fast as I possibly can. The aim is to hit full throttle in at least two gears before braking as hard as I dare as the next one approaches. I haven’t managed it yet, mainly because the VFR’s throttle cable seems to have been designed for a bike with a throttle twice the diameter. One full rotation of my wrist is nowhere near enough to get there.

This is all a bit pointless anyway, because the quick-revving motor is bouncing off the redline way before I get close. It’s a great game though – you’ll be surprised how rapidly this sports tourer accelerates when asked rudely, and even more surprised how quickly it stops when there’s a gantry approaching.

But more than that, it’s the stability on the brakes that really impresses. A combination of good suspension set-up, smart geometry that allows quick steering and stability, plus a simple-but-effective ABS system for back up. I used to dislike Honda’s linked CBS brakes, but the latest versions, linked to ABS, are superb.

The other surprise with all this silliness is that I’m still averaging more than 50mpg. All this straight lining is taking its toll on the tyres though. The OE Dunlops are starting to flatten off in the middle, which makes corners a lot less fun than before. I’ve just ordered a set of Pirelli Angel GTs to replace them. Hopefully they’ll be fitted and scrubbed in by next week.