Tadao Baba (馬場忠雄) is a retired Japanese motorcycle engineer, the original designer of the Honda Fireblade.
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.
[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.
Instead Baba proposed to develop Total Control around the chassis dimensions of a 750, using the same base motor and its bore, but with an increase in stroke to create an 893cc engine, keeping it closer and hence performance-competitive with the existing 1000cc bikes.
[2] The result of the original FireBlade in 1992 on the market, which was 90 pounds (41 kg) lighter than the nearest competitor, was that it sold so many units by capturing sales from both the tourer and existing sports bike ranges.