Originally posted by DogBoneR1
The slower your first bike, the faster you'll be.
Sounds contradictory, but allow me to explain. If your first bike is one of the faster ones on the market (which currently would mean about any 750cc sportbike or larger), you will rarely be forced to push yourself to get much performance out of the bike. With that much power on tap, you can simply twist the throttle and away you go. Getting a bike to accelerate is about the easiest thing you can do. Braking, shifting, and cornering require more skill, more knowledge, and a lot more practice.
When the inexperienced rider on a big bike goes riding with friends on a twisty back road or even on a racetrack, he will find himself struggling to keep up. Usually, he will rely on the bike's power. He's going fast, but he is using a tiny fraction of the bike's performance and he can be a very lazy rider. Not good.
Starting on a small bike forces the rider to extract all the performance out of the bike. To do this, a rider must become skilled. Plus, starting small decreases your margin for error. The first rider will be going far faster on the straights with his more powerful bike. But at the end of that straight is a corner waiting. Some serious braking and a quick transition to hard cornering is required. Just a slight miscalculation can mean an accident and at these speeds accidents are more likely to be serious ones.
So from here on out, I'm not going to respond to threads asking "What size bike should I start on?" or any other variance of the question. Start Small!!
good advice!