VFR800X Crossrunner (RC60)

The hardware here is genuinely strong, and haul it down hard from real speed and the bike stays flat and settled rather than diving and squirming. My reservation is entirely about the control philosophy. Squeeze one lever and the system quietly brings the other in for you, which is fine day to day but takes away your ability to set the front-to-rear balance yourself. Ride with deliberate, independent inputs and you'll feel the setup working against you instead of with you.

Push it on a technical road and the Crossrunner does something its category rivals can't: it lets you keep the engine spinning high through a run of tight corners while the frame underneath never loses its composure. That pairing of a properly sporty top end with a settled, easygoing chassis shouldn't coexist as well as it does. It's playful with it, too. The front end comes up without much coaxing and stays there happily, because the power simply refuses to taper off.

Handling is clearly where Honda concentrated its engineering effort, and the reward shows up in how little the bike demands of you. It turns with an easy, honest neutrality: aim it into a corner and it simply goes, none of the twitchiness of something over-eager and none of the reluctance of something heavy and slow to change direction. What wins me over most is its behavior when the tarmac turns messy. Where the surface breaks up and traction comes and goes between corners, the chassis stays legible beneath you, the messages clear enough that you trust them and hold your pace instead of easing off. That same composure is what makes it such a broad-appeal machine. A skilled rider can lean on it and it answers in kind, while someone still finding their feet gets a bike that reads as predictable and unhurried rather than something to be wary of. Getting both out of a single chassis is a rarer trick than it seems.

The thing that nags at me on a bike this openly aimed at touring is the rear preload. There's no hydraulic adjuster anywhere on it, so every time I move from solo to two-up, or from a light load to a fully packed one, I'm digging out a hook wrench and finding some patience. It isn't a job you knock out at a fuel stop, and on a machine carrying this much long-haul intent, leaving that adjustment fully manual sits a step behind where the rest of the bike lives. The seating gives a little ground too, asking a quiet compromise that only reveals itself the longer you stay aboard rather than in the first ten minutes. Neither point sinks the thing, but together they mark comfort as the area where the Crossrunner most plainly admits it was drawn to juggle several jobs instead of nailing one.

This is the reason you buy the thing, and it gets to you in a way no spec sheet warns you about. Wind it out and the four just keeps building past the point every instinct is telling you to change up, with the strongest, most vocal part of the whole rev sweep waiting right at the top. On an upright, easy-sitting machine that is a genuinely strange thing to have underneath you, and it never quite stops feeling like you're getting away with something. The one honest asterisk is the mid-range VTEC handover. The extra power lands as a distinct kick rather than a smooth build, and though the timing repeats cleanly enough that you learn to ride through it, that sharpness can catch you out depending on how you ride and what's under your tires. Sort out its rhythm and it recedes. It's the lone trait stopping a superb motor short of seamless.

The motor itself is about as close to a non-issue as this class gives you, so long as it's kept to schedule, and the record from high-mileage owners backs that up without much argument. The real reliability conversation lives in two specific spots. The first is the charging setup on the earliest bikes, where the stator is the known soft point. You'll usually get a warning first, a battery that no longer wants to hold a full charge, and catch it there and the repair stays sensible; miss it and you'll learn about it at the roadside. The second is the valve inspection. It falls due rarely, but the labor behind it runs deep enough that the invoice lands with real weight, and I've watched owners push that service further out than the manual specifies, trusting the valvetrain to shrug it off. I follow the logic. I still wouldn't put my name to it as advice.

The one-bike-for-everything idea is easy to promise and hard to deliver, and this is one of the few that actually gets close. Ask it to commute, run a weekend loop, or carry luggage for a proper trip and no single one of those roles feels like the afterthought. My one grumble is the missing center stand, which you have to order separately. On a bike with real touring in its brief, making routine chain upkeep more awkward than necessary is a strange omission.