1984 Honda VF1000F

I could have bought a sports bike, or a cruiser, or a muscle bike but I didn’t. You see I like older bikes, I like to be able to see an engine and recognise all the bits and I like to ride a bike that doesn’t have to be serviced by Nasa! I suppose the simple fact is that I like riding bikes not studying metallurgy or electronics.

That’s why I bought a 1980’s superbike, a Honda VF1000F to be precise. It looks bad, goes like £$%^ and cost me to buy, less than an R1 would have cost me to insure. OK so it doesn’t go round corners but on the positive side that has saved me a fortune in knee sliders. On the subject of accessories, riding a 16 year old bike also means that I don’t have to wear a Day-Glo leather baby grow when I go out. And I can get away with a perfectly serviceable Nolan crash hat instead of a titanium lined, acid etched work of art in the latest colours finished off with hi-tech furry bunny ears.

Another positive advantage is that I don’t get pulled for having an illegal plate because mine is the size of a small developing country hanging in the slipstream. I must admit that there is one small problem – I can’t find a performance exhaust system in any motorcycle publication published since 1988 and my current one is stamped ‘The Plumb Centre’. I like to think that this is because the system is designed to look perfectly symmetrical from the rear but friends remain unconvinced.

The bike’s aforesaid inability to go round corners also means I don’t have to spend a fortune on race developed tyres. In fact I’ve found that after a few months the postman has left enough discarded rubber in my front garden to enable me to create perfectly useable boots from scratch. Cheap and nasty maybe, but if you take the right line and apply just enough brake you can erase almost any mark on the road!

So would I swap my VF1000F for a pocket rocket or a state of the art muscle bike? Would I swap economical transport for a sculptured, sexy race machine with the performance of a missile?

… I might be tight but I’m not bloody stupid! "