eternal, you’re right about the difficulty of mastering clutch/throttle control as a beginner, of course. It took some time before I completely stopped stalling the bike on take offs. Even after learning the basics of riding on an “easy” bike (GS500), there was certainly some fear in my heart when I started riding a 600cc (YZF600R); I’m far from riding anywhere close to it’s potentials at this point, I might add. My point was that you have to do everything right all at once to ride a sportbike well, and if I had to pick the number one problem with it, I feel it’s the silly ergonomics for low speed. With the low clip-ons (or a low handlebar), all the extra weight on the arms/wrists (before a beginner learned the need, and the how, to keep the weight off the arms/wrists), and the extra balance required, clutch/throttle control becomes that much more difficult to manipulate.
However, when I say you need to be “ready” for a bike, I didn’t mean to say that you must first completely max out the performance potential of a bike smalller than that. I wasn’t talking about racing where results are measured in absolute terms, so you don’t need to be able to ride a 600cc to the max before moving to a 1000cc for the performance gain. I was talking riding a bike within your ability for general enjoyment on public roads. On public roads, you don’t need to max out the performance potential of a Civic before moving to an Accord. All I’m saying is, don’t jumpt to a Corvette, if you don’t even know how to drive a Civic. When you jump from a beginner’s model to an expert’s model, motorcycles are a lot less forgiving than cars. There’s no crumple zone to save you; you are the crumple zone. When you do one thing wrong, a whole bunch of wrongs follow right behind.