Tadao Baba

is a retired Japanese motorcycle engineer, the original designer of the Honda Fireblade.

Career Baba joined Honda Motorcycles from high school in 1962, aged 18 — the company itself was only 14 years old. Working in the machinery section, he made crankcases and cylinder heads for Honda's Honda CB72 and Honda CB77. At age 20, Baba moved to Honda's R&D department, which is where he spent the rest of his career until retiring in 2004. He continued as a consultant until 2009.

Total Control In the late 1980s, sports motorcycles were very fast, with magazines rating bikes on their top speed. To house a 1000cc engine the bikes became heavy, while to ensure the stability of the bikes at high speed, the chassis became longer. The result was a series of fast bikes, which didn't handle in corners.

Baba began developing a new concept in sports motorcycles under the title "Total Control," based on the fundamentals of fun to ride, easy to control.

After winning over the Honda Marketing team who were sceptical about creating a new class of motorcycle, the new 900cc class was created with one bike from all manufacturers globally in the class. This created both a marketing risk, but also a technological advantage should the class take off. The result of the original FireBlade in 1992 on the market, which was lighter than the nearest competitor, was that it sold so many units by capturing sales from both the tourer and existing sports bike ranges. This resulted the competition not catching up until Yamaha created the lighter 1000cc R1 in 1998, which created the modern 1000cc Supersports category.

Personal life Married, Baba has a reputation amongst Honda test riders and media journalists as a smoker who often crashes his bikes, although he claims to have only ever crashed four FireBlades.