It was a good day even if it wasn’t as planned.

I was hoping to hit the road for a good ride down to Poole Harbour today with a friend on his brand new Honda.

As it happens, having a brand new Honda was a bit of a problem. My friend, who we’ll call Alfred for the sake of keeping his identify secure, picked his bike up from the Honda dealership last Wednesday.

No sooner had he ridden it out of the showroom than it was due for its first service. Well, that’s a slight exaggeration - he has a pre service distance of only 600 miles so he didn’t want to use up all his miles on a long road trip! Dagnamit!

To be fair, if I were Alfred I’d probably feel the same way.

So instead we kept it a little closer to home and covered a mere 100 miles en route to mid Wales and back.

There were some very nice roads and Alfred certainly knows how to ride. Even with very modest power he was very rapid in the bendy bits and he pushed me to up my game a bit.

In the last week or so I’ve made a couple of mods to my bike. I fitted a sport screen earlier in the week and just yesterday I installed a BoosterPlug unit.

For those of you who’ve never heard of BoosterPlug, it is a small device that connects to the air temperature sensor and the bike’s ECU. There are no wires to cut and installation takes less than 15 minutes. It’s purpose is to fool the ECU into thinking the air temperature is lower than it actually is, and thus alter fuelling so it’s a bit richer under certain conditions, so it’s not constantly running lean.

Now, while I love my bike its throttle can be a little jumpy, especially at low speeds and in lower gears, it’s more like an on/off switch. The BoosterPlug has done an incredible job of making everything much smoother and on today’s ride it was like being on a totally different bike! Throttle input is now much more progressive and it’s not trying to throw me off at the slightest twitch of my right hand. Result!

As for the sport screen, the jury is out. I don’t dislike it, it looks really cool but the touring screen was much nicer to sit behind.