Tadao Baba

Tadao Baba (馬場忠雄) is a retired Japanese motorcycle engineer, the original designer of the Honda Fireblade.

Career

Baba joined

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.[1] Baba states this as the reason which inspired him to design the FireBlade:^[2]

It was in 1989 and I was riding with a group of Honda engineers on some of the competitors' machines. There was a Suzuki GSX-R1100, a Yamaha FZR1000 and our own Honda CBR1000F. I was thinking, 'How can these be called sports bikes when they are so very big and heavy?' They didn't deserve the name.

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.^[1]

The first bike developed under Total Control was the

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.[1]

References