Late Interception

Late Interception

LEANINGS

Peter Egan

I’VE BEEN CALLED A LOT OF THINGS IN my life, but avant-garde isn’t one of them. Other people usually get there first.

For instance, all my friends were Neil Young and Allman Brothers fans for about two years before I suddenly realized these guys were musical geniuses and ran out and bought all their albums. And the world was essentially overrun with four-cylinder motorcycles before I finally took a test ride on a Honda CB750 in 1976. Anyone could see that light, narrow British vertical-Twins were better in every way.

Also, I still don’t have a cell phone, but I may have to cave in on this one.

I was at the book store yesterday and wanted to call home and tell Barb I’d be a little late for dinner (as usual) because I was loading up on costly British motorcycle magazines, and I discovered the store had actually removed its pay phone from the wall.

“Pay phone?” the young clerk said, blinking in confusion. “No, we don’t have a pay phoneT

Her tone implied I might have better luck finding a live mastodon stuck in a tar pit.

Anyway, I’m usually a little bit behind the curve. Ideas and concepts develop slowly in my brain, kind of like beautiful crystals forming deep underground, or a termite infestation in the structural beams of your house. These things take time.

And so it was with the Honda VFR800 Interceptor.

We’re talking last generation here, the 1998-2001. (I haven’t quite warmed up to the current VTEC models; you’ll have to give me time.)

But a mere nine years ago, when the last-generation Interceptors came out, I was visiting California from my rustic rural Wisconsin home and Editor Edwards was kind enough to lend me a new VFR800 testbike for the weekend.

I did what I always do, which is rip over the Ortega Highway at dawn in search of coffee at the Lookout Café and Mexican food in Lake Elsinore. By the time I returned the bike to our office, I was fairly smitten with the red Honda.

It didn’t have quite the midrange wallop of my favorite big-bore Twins, but it had surprisingly good torque for an 800 and was plenty fast. Good sounds, too, from cam gears and tail pipe alike.

At low rpm the V-Four sounded like a small-block Chevy, and on the upper end it howled like an Indycar. The off-beat shuffle at idle was interesting, too.

But what I mainly liked about the bike was its completeness. Nice turn-in, compliant yet taut suspension, comfortable seat, perfectly positioned handlebars, nice overall size. Not too big, not too small. Typical Honda controls, as if everything had been lined with teflon and velvet. Civilized, yet not to the point of blandness. The bike still had a racebike edge beneath that smooth bodywork.

I parked the bike at CW and walked away looking over my shoulder, making a mental note to resume the relationship at some point in the future.

Well, that future arrived last spring.

I was facing the summer with a mere two motorcycles in my “collection,” if you don’t count a Bridgestone 50 that doesn’t run yet, despite my best efforts to think about working on it. I had just my Suzuki DR650 and KTM 950 Adventure.

Yes, I was-as Paul Roberts, the drummer in our garage band, put it-“Skating on thin bikes.”

The DR had big knobbies on it for trail riding, so the KTM had become my main road bike. A good one, too. I could travel on it, or blast the back roads reasonably well with my sportbike buddies. It was fast, flickable and charismatic.

But...

But you corner differently on a big adventure-tourer with tall, skinny dualsport tires. Enter straight, flick it in and power out. You tend not to get a knee out, lean hard on that front tire and ooze through an apex while dialing the power on, as you do on a sportbike. I missed the alternate riding style that comes with a big fat set of gummy street tires.

So this spring my brain shuffled through its paltry set of index cards and extracted that memory of riding the VFR in California-along with the 30 or 40 positive road tests and “Best of Class” awards the Interceptor has generated over the years. I decided I needed another sportbike and the VFR was a likely finalist. Lo and behold, one showed up in the classifieds of our local paper. A 2001 with 16,000 miles on the clock. Immaculate, the ad said. It was, and the owner lived just six miles from our house, so I bought it-for a reasonable price.

The bike has a Two Brothers canister on it, pleasantly growly but not too loud, as well as a Corbin seat (original included). Since buying it, I’ve replaced the chain and sprockets, had a tune-up and valve adjust done and installed a set of Pirelli Diablos on the recommendation of a friend who rides faster than I do and doesn’t crash. (I call this “passive/aggressive tire testing.”)

So far, it’s been a great summer with the Interceptor. Sunday-morning rides, weekend trips, two-up getaways into the hinterlands (Barb likes the back seat). I’d go anywhere on this thing, and it’s good to have a sportbike again, even if it’s not at the sharply pointed racer-replica end of the stick.

Back when the Interceptor was first being tested in the magazines, a common editorial comment was, “If I had to have just one streetbike, this would be it.”

So could the VFR become my only bike?

I suppose so.

But on alternate days the KTM makes a perfect stablemate, a more raw-boned and eccentric yin to the Honda’s civilized yang. The VFR is so good, it almost requires a second bike for pure contrastsomething more evil and unfiltered, with larger individual bangs.

An older classic might work in this role as well. Norton Commando...BSA 441 Victor...Shovelhead Harley...bevel Ducati...the possibilities are endless.

Too endless, maybe. That’s why Mr. Honda was always smiling and got so wealthy.