Jaguar F-TYPE my best design ever – Callum

Jaguar Design Director Ian Callum says the upcoming F-TYPE is his favourite car of all time.

Speaking to motoring.com.au during an exclusive design workshop prior to the F-TYPE’s world debut at the recent Paris motor show – and its Australian debut next week – Mr Callum said the all-new roadster is the best car he has ever designed.

For the record, that includes an extensive list of landmark models during a long and illustrious career, which began at Ford UK in 1979 and includes stints in Japan, Italy and Australia, before he headed TWR Design from 1991 and then Jaguar design from 1999.

Mr Callum was responsible for the 2006 XK coupe, 2008 XF sedan, 2010 XJ limousine and the striking C-X75 concept, and also oversaw a range of programs for TWR Design clients including HSV, Mazda and Volvo, but he is most famous for creating the Aston Martin DB7 and Vanquish.

“I love this car (the F-TYPE) more than anything I’ve done – including the XJ and Astons,” he said.

“This is the one car I want to go and buy – a red one. It’s a lot more mature than the Aston. I truly am very pleased with it – it’s a very complete car.”

Jaguar’s design chief said the finished F-TYPE product is exactly what he’d hoped for, although pedestrian safety legislation prevented it being quite as low as he’d have liked.

“Other than taking a couple of inches of height out – which obviously we can’t do (I wouldn’t change a thing),” he said.

Mr Callum said the designs of both the F-TYPE convertible and lighter and more aerodynamic coupe, which will follow the open-top model on sale later next year, were locked in about 18 month ago – before the CX-16 concept that previewed the latter at the 2011 Frankfurt show – and indicated a chopped-top spyder version could also be on the cards.

“We designed the convertible first, so the coupe becomes more natural,” he revealed. “Convertibles are notoriously difficult to make slippery. Maybe one day we’ll do a spyder...”

Asked if the F-TYPE’s styling would influence the design of other Jaguar sportscars, Mr Callum indicated the next-generation XK would grow in size to reflect its position as the British brand’s flagship sportscar.

“There’s room to move somewhere else now (with the XK),” he said. “It’s not out only sportscar now. Should it be bigger? Customers don’t want that, but it’s a very tight 2+2.”

Mr Callum stressed that although the F-TYPE is the spiritual successor for Jaguar’s iconic 50-year-old E-Type and therefore retains a number of historic design cues, it was designed to be a thoroughly modern Jaguar sportscar first and foremost.

“This is a car we’ve been looking forward to for a long time, not least of all because it’s Jaguar’s first two-seater sportscar since the wonderful E-Type,” he said.

“But this is not an E-Type Jaguar it’s an F-TYPE Jaguar and it’s not until you drive it that you realise what the F-TYPE means.

“We designed this car from the ground up, but there are E-Type cues. If you want an E-Type then buy an E-Type. But if a man from Mars came and saw them for the first time I know which one he’d buy.”

While the heavily barrelled door sections from the E-Type and XK continue, gone is Jaguar’s trademark oval-shaped sportscar grille.

“The doors are very barrelled, so the shape is quite tubular to eat up the mass because we didn’t want it to look tall,” said Mr Callum.

“We did look at using the oval grille from previous Jaguar sportscars, but we really felt the reference to the past was too strong and we had to move on.

“We’ve also created a new front-end for the XF and XJ, so let’s use it more. Let’s make that a more familiar face for Jaguar, so we developed that into a wider, lower version that will last.

“Jaguar has a face people recognise now, but in the past it had an eclectic mix of about 20 different designs. A luxury brand needs an identity, a sense of consistency.”

Mr Callum said pedestrian safety dictated a deployable clamshell bonnet design, but the F-TYPE’s bonnet bulge harks back almost 45 years.

“We made the bonnet as low as we possibly could after negotiation and negotiation with various component engineers to get that surface seven or eight millimetres lower than it might otherwise have been.

“The bonnet bulge is familiar from all our current cars and goes back to the 1968 XJ. It’s part of our heritage. Do we need it? No. Can we use it? Yes and we do - as long as we reinterpret it in a modern way. That’s what really matters.”

Mr Callum said that of the four basic elements Jaguar design – proportion, beautiful lines, clean surfaces and detailing – the former was by far the most important when it came to the F-TYPE.

“First there’s the fundamental visual architecture – the proportion of the car, or what I call the draughtsmanship of the car. It’s the very thing that turns your head when it passes you, what you see from 200 metres away, what makes you want to look at the car more.

“It’s the overall shape and we worked very hard to get that right. We worked every millimetre to get the proportional architecture right on the F-TYPE.

“We worked with the engine and chassis people to make sure this vehicle was the correct shape, including the wheelbase, the offset, the position of the wheels relative to the body, the overhangs, the amount of mass over both front and rear wheels, the roof height and in particular the height of the windscreen.

“We work every millimetre because these cars have their skins wrapped as tightly as possible around them. We have components to wrap, we have legislation and other packaging to deal with.”

Mr Callum said an F-TYPE highlight was the full-length body crease that began at the oversized air-intakes either side of the central air-dam.

“Beside the grille are very strong side vents split down by the middle by a very clean splitter plate, which is the starting point for a crease line that runs through the front wing and the door and disappears into the rear wing.

“We create these lines as pencil lines, but the difficult part is keeping them on the car through the whole process, the digital process, the feasibility process, the manufacturing process. It goes on and on and our job is keep hold of those lines to maintain the spontaneity, and that’s the strength of Jaguar – to maintain those lines.

“These are the two lines this car is built around – everything else hangs off those lines.”

However, Mr Callum said it was the rear-end that set the all-aluminium F-TYPE apart from its rivals.

“The rear-end is very muscular, very brave,” he said. “The tail is lower than you might imagine in a classical, very elegant way. Rather than let the tail of the car drop off vertically which tends to be the fashion, we applied a protruding bumper.

“We wanted to visually lighten it in every way we could, so a slim bob-tailed tail-light is another significant design element.

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