Richy Vida and his love affair with the Honda VFR 800

For those that don’t know Richy Vida lets start off with a little background! Is Richy a talented musician? Is he an experienced motorcycle adventurer? Does he have his own festival? In answer to this yes!

Richy is a great online personality who brings his dry British wit to anything motorcycle. He has amassed nearly twenty thousand subscribers on youtube due to his fun and enjoyable video presenting style where he travels all over the place on his motorcycles. He also is a talented musician who is not afraid to play stripped back acoustically!

But let's talk about the bikes. If you follow Richy you will definitely know of his long running love affair with the venerable Honda VFR 800. The VFR 800 is a very special motorcycle but it’s difficult to explain what it is as it doesn’t fall in any specific category. It’s neither a sports bike or a tourer but shares aspects of both which is key to its romantic effect on it’s owners. Then there’s the engine!

Most people just call it the VFR 800 but it was actually introduced as the “Interceptor”. In an ode to the high speed, long range fighters of the cold war that would climb high into the atmosphere to meet incoming nuclear bombers the VFR shares these same attributes in it’s delivery as a motorcycle. 

The VFR 800 was preceded by the VFR 750 which has been considered by some as the best all-round motorcycle that money could buy. As with all things motorcycle, bikes that share some real DNA with thoroughbred racing machine just always seem to be better as they feel that bit more special than your average consumer bike. The 782cc liquid cooled V4 engine used in the VFR is a direct if not detuned version of the powerplant found in the RC45 race bike which went on to win the 1997 FIM Superbike World Championship in the hands of John Kocinski.

With this we start to get a glimpse of the brilliance of what the VFR 800 truly is. You take Hondas decades of experience at building reliable, long distance touring machines but instead of using a lumbering low revving lump as found in pretty much all tourers you take the engine from a thoroughbred World Superbike Championship winning bike and voila! A legend is born.

Subsequently Richy has been all over on his beloved VFR Including Scotland, Croatia, Norway and even the USA! This shows the adaptability of the Honda VFR 800 in that you can comfortably travel for thousands of miles while enjoying proper sport bike  power and riding feel.

Richy has been a long time supporter of Ultimateaddons as he travels so much and needs a navigation and smartphone system that is extremely rugged and waterproof. By reducing all of his needs down to a smartphone he is able to leave the bulky Satnav behind and reduce both his traveling weight and complexity. 

Richy uses the Ultimateaddons 17.5-20.5mm fork stem attachment that utilises a 25mm ball which he then attaches one of our 3 inch extenders so that he can position his Ultimateaddons iPhone X case perfectly to his line of sight so he can keep track of the navigation directions and easily access his blutooth music.