My life in 12 cars: British design hero Ian Callum

Callum’s father, a solicitor, wasn’t a car man, but it was still a big day in 1960 when the family acquired its first car, a pre-war Standard Flying Ten, although it didn’t last that long.

“Its arrival was a source of fascination for me,” Callum recalls. “I was already drawing lots of cars, and I can remember being fascinated by the curves of the Standard’s front wings. I used to climb on top and slide down them, which my father didn’t like. And I was fascinated by what I saw as the sporty rake of the rear. It wasn’t a sporty car, but it looked good to me.”

The family used the Standard for regular trips to Edinburgh from home in Dumfries, but it was already an old car and it didn’t last; Callum remembers his dad arriving home from work on foot one day, saying the car wouldn’t be back because its engine had fallen out. “He became a Vauxhall Victor man after that.”

Ford Zephyr Mk4

When he was about 11, Callum went away to boarding school and soon noticed that other kids’ parents drove Rovers and Jaguars, not a battered old Victor like his own. His often-expressed wish that the family had something more interesting must have been partly responsible for their acquiring a Ford Zephyr Mk4, the 2.0-litre V4 model.

“It was quite a novel car,” says Callum, “with that long, aircraft-carrier bonnet and short boot. The engine was so tiny they could mount the spare wheel in front of it, behind the radiator. I loved that car. We had it for years and it eventually got pretty beaten up. It taught me to drive and I used to tear around Dumfries in it, loaded up with mates. It had a big, wide front bench seat and a column gearchange, so we could go six up.”

It was perfectly apparent by then that Callum was heading for a car design career, and the family used the Zephyr to drive to Coventry’s Lanchester Polytechnic (now Coventry University), where a course in Transport Design had just begun and young Callum had organised an interview. “I drove the Zephyr into the front of a bus and totalled it,” he recalls. “We had to drive home in a hired Morris Marina.”

Coventry didn’t work for Callum the first time around. A combination of illness and a general dislike of the city’s forbidding 1971 ambience meant he eventually trained at what he calls “an eclectic mix of colleges”: a reluctant year at Lanchester, then Aberdeen, Glasgow and finally postgraduate studies at the Royal College of Art in London, where he was sponsored by Ford.

Volvo PV544 Hot Rod

“It wasn’t the usual trip through university,” he says, “but it was great. I never went through the agonies of kids today. The whole seven years of my education was paid for by someone else. And towards the end I was sponsored by Ford, where I could work in the holidays and get paid as well.

“My most significant car at that time was a Volvo PV544 bought from Peter Stevens, a fellow student and to this day a tutor at the RCA. The car had been hot-rodded and rode on big American mag wheels. We dropped an 1800cc MG B engine into it, which made it go pretty well, but the fuel consumption was a disaster, and I couldn’t really afford that as a student, so it had to go. Still, I reckoned I was the bee’s knees while I had it.”

VW Beetle Convertible

Once he’d graduated and was in full-time work at Ford, Callum wanted some more capable wheels. Drop-top Volkswagen Beetles were considered pretty chic around London, so he bought one: black with a cream top.

“I got the valve timing wrong, which made it overheat and run rich, and that’s death to a horizontally opposed engine – the excess fuel washes oil out of the bores – so the engine blew and I had to fit a new one,” says Callum. “But when it was fixed, I went everywhere in that car – umpteen trips to Scotland, to the south of France – and never thought anything of it.”

Ford Sierra RS Cosworth

Few car designers enjoy getting the spanners out as much as Callum (“I still love it’), but after two and a half Beetle years, he did the obvious thing and started running Fords on the company scheme, at first Fiesta XR2s, because they were small, funky and fun to drive. Then a Sierra Cosworth came into his life, the bold original one with a massive tea-tray spoiler – or “picnic tray”, as he calls it, having used it that way for outings with the young family he now had.

“That car taught me to drive properly,” he says. “It was close to perfect in so many ways. It had a great engine, and I used to change gears without the clutch, because you could. Its 0-60mph time probably wasn’t all that great in today’s terms, but it felt really quick. My brother Moray was working as a designer at Peugeot in France at that time, so we took it over there all the time and beat up the French around the Paris Périphérique.”

The Cossie was Callum’s first proper company car and the priciest thing you could choose on the company scheme. “Guys my age in Escort diesel estates wanted to know how come I was running it, and I’d always say I was prepared to pay a ransom, because I wanted the car. It brings tears to my eyes when I remember how much I loved that car. I should have kept it.

“You’re supposed to give them back after 6000 miles, maximum 10,000, but I kept ignoring the letters and gave it back after 18 months with 36,000 miles on the clock. The fleet bloke went ballistic.”

Aston Martin DB7

Callum worked happily at Ford for 11 years in various roles, travelling to Ford outposts around the globe and ending up with an absorbing year as design manager at the Ghia studio in Turin, Italy, where he produced notable concepts such as Ford’s Zig and Zag and the Ghia Via, at one stage employing (and briefly firing) his brother Moray – another story.

Back at Ford’s Dunton facility in Essex, he found himself designing steering wheels again, a job he’d had a decade earlier, so he started looking around for something better. He chatted with his friend Peter Stevens, who was working for Tom Walkinshaw at TWR between jobs at Lotus. Walkinshaw wanted Stevens to open a TWR design studio, but he already had an offer from McLaren (to do the F1) and reckoned Callum might be the right man for TWR.

“Peter introduced me to Tom and at the same time told him he was heading off to McLaren. What an interview that was! Luckily, I got on really well with Tom from the earliest times. The Scottish connection was always good, and he trusted me. It was always the same with Tom: as long as you delivered, he was your best mate.”

The first project was the Aston Martin DB7, truly a make-or-break product for the beleaguered firm. “You couldn’t be more lucky than that,” says Callum, “but I was terrified – and naïve as well. I didn’t realise the company’s whole future rested on that car. Ford [Aston’s owner] needed to be impressed by the initial work to hand over the money we’d need to build it. The risk was enormous. But that car taught me to be rigorous with my own judgements – to question my own conclusions all the time – and it came out pretty well.”

The Fords bigwigs were expecting Callum and Walkinshaw to show a clay model at a specially arranged London meeting of the big board, but they actually drove to it in a running car – a truly staggering achievement. The car was supposed to be based on the Jaguar XJS, but Walkinshaw had his engineers modify the structure enormously, change the cowl height and position, rear overhang, rear suspension layout and engine position (twice) so the DB7 would look right. And it did. There were early quality problems, but the DB7 became far and away the best-selling Aston in history. And it saved the company.

Aston Martin Vanquish

Callum cherishes his work on the Vanquish enough to want to work on it some more, but he especially rates it because it was his first chance to work with consummate engineer Bob Dover, now a close friend, who became Aston’s big boss at just the right time, having made a towering success of DB7 production.

The mission was to make a new Aston flagship – and to move on from using old XJS underbits – and by now the project had the invaluable support of Ford’s dynamic big chief, Jac Nasser, who owned a DBS himself, so he “knew what an Aston was”. Along the way, Nasser had managed to get Aston back into the James Bond films, a big coup. Even now, Callum – always more self-critical than most designers – likes the work he did with that car. “I’d do a few things differently if I were to reskin it,” he says, “but not many.”

Callum worked at TWR for nine years, insisting when big-company designer friends came calling that he was happier in his “tin shed” than they were in their luxurious, climate-controlled studios, designing door handles. Then Geoff Lawson, a Callum contemporary and Jaguar’s design chief, tragically and unexpectedly died, and as the best-qualified and obvious choice, Callum was offered the job. Everyone knew it was a no-brainer and he went for it with Walkinshaw’s blessing.

Much important work followed: first the Jaguar XK coupé, which strongly indicated how Jaguar’s face might change, and then the XF saloon, which changed it for good, leaping two generations at once. Then came the XE, which aimed to play in the same pool as the BMW 3 Series. Callum doesn’t say so, but this saloon pair were exhilarating but fraught projects that might have been better had there been less management interference.

Even so, Callum’s influence and reputation rose rapidly. Outsiders could see what a heroic task it had been to drag Jaguar styling 15 years forward in an adverse environment. Callum became one of the nation’s favourite designers, quoted everywhere and collecting honours personally and for the cars. Inside, he was the same modest and uncomplicated car lover as ever.

Ferrari 250 GT SWB

From early years, Callum had always cited the Pininfarina-styled Ferrari 250 GT short-wheelbase as his idea of the most beautiful car, and in 2012 he had a chance to sample its excellence, taking part in several days of hard and fast driving in the most famous example going with owner Clive Beacham on the roads around Ullapool (whose magnificence he remembered from holidays with his parents). The exercise also featured a lightweight E-Type. Callum calls those days “the biggest box tick ever” and “one of the greatest drives of my life”. The Ferrari felt every bit as fabulous as it looked…

1932 Ford Model B Hot Rod

Callum has never been able to resist the urge to collect cars. Today, he has a Beetle convertible (a different one), a couple of Mini Coopers, a Jaguar XJ-C, an Aston Vanquish, a modified 993-gen Porsche 911, a Triumph TR6 and several more.

The star of his private car collection is undoubtedly his Ford Model B Coupé hot rod, powered by a Windsor 351cu in V8. He was introduced to US car culture at age 13 and his brother bought him some magazines on the subject. Then about 20 years ago he met John Golding, one of Britain’s finest builders of custom cars, who brought his own 1932 Ford coupé to Callum’s Gaydon headquarters for a meeting that turned into a friendship.

The upshot was that Golding agreed to build a 1932 coupé for Callum, who has owned it in various guises ever since. In fact, he’s due to collect the Model B from Golding this very week, although not for the first time. The car is now in its third guise; having started its hot-rodding life with a 2.5in roof chop, it has now had another inch removed. The latest colour is Porsche grey, and it’s now on new five-spoke mags, not steel wheels as before. “This is what happens with hot rods,” says Callum. “You change them.”

Jaguar F-Type

Callum says he never expected to be as prominent as he has become in the design world. Even when the attention-getting DB7 job came along, he assumed it would make him a one-hit wonder. Instead, over successive decades, he has acquired a worldwide reputation as the man who created Jaguar’s new face, who brought Jaguar up to date and who can speak up in any forum for modern British design.

Callum has two favourites from his Jag years, the first of which is the F-Type sports car. “To be involved in producing ‘the next E-Type’ is a privilege I’d never have imagined for myself in a million years,” he says. “What an honour!

“I think the car works pretty well, and I say that with a true heart. But things are changing at JLR [Jaguar Land Rover] and I just hope the people who count there won’t be tempted to underestimate the value of a car like this in the line-up. It’s worth much more than money. At times, it did strike me that the car wasn’t discussed internally with the same passion as, say, Porsche people would discuss the 911.