Jamal Hameedi of JLR Special Vehicle Operations

American-born engineering director of Jaguar Land Rover SVO on cool jobs, designers vs engineers and the Dakar Rally

I’VE BEEN engineering director for Jaguar Land Rover’s Special Vehicle Operations since last summer, based at what used to be RAF Fen End in Warwickshire. This amazing facility is one of the things that attracted me to the company. We have the ability to build a vehicle here totally from scratch – a Project 8 body-inwhite is shipped in at one end of the building and a completed car comes out the other. There aren’t a lot of performance operations in the world that have that resource at their fingertips.

Day-to-day there are several facets to my job. First is the strategic cycle planning: whether it’s developing all the tech or the performance vehicle concepts, we spend a lot of time reviewing rivals’ benchmarking data and putting together business cases for new ideas – although much of that is done in the pub.

Then there’s product creation, working in the studio on active vehicle programmes. I have a creative side, so working with the design and engineering teams is a cool part of the job. I’m usually mediating between them. The black art of a great car is knowing when to listen to the engineers and when to listen to the designers. If you listen to one group exclusively, you’ll screw it up and make an awful car. You have to pick and choose, to navigate your way to the vision.

It’s exciting, taking a car from an idea in your head all the way to conception and creation. To see it coming out of a factory is why I do what I do. It’s one of the most rewarding things from a creative standpoint. There’s a lot of design time, with chassis, interior, exterior or powertrain guys. And then there’s the vehicle engineering, which influences the attribute side; how does a car sound, steer, accelerate, brake? That’s in-car driving time, which is never a bad thing. So it’s quite a diverse day.

I grew up in St Louis and trained as an electrical engineer. I built a few alternatively powered vehicles at college, then I went straight to Ford, where I worked for 27 years. I started in powertrain calibration. At 21 I was handed a laptop and a $500,000 prototype, and told to go and tune it. Alaska for the cold, Arizona for the heat, Colorado for altitude. Just come back in a couple of years and make sure it’s good.

It was one of the coolest jobs I’ve had. No meetings; you spend all day at the test track. Then I was an off-road racing engineer for a trophy truck team for eight years. Ford provided an engine, transmission, data logging and harnesses, and I rewrote all the software into a much quicker and leaner set-up. I would go out to races and support the team.

Then the 2005 GT came along, and the team was recruited from race engineers and weekend hobbyist racers. Once you work on something like that, you never go back to pedestrian vehicles again. So I just stayed there for the rest of my career at Ford. After the GT I did the Shelby GT500, and the Raptor in 2009. The idea came from off-roading in Baja; we spent many nights waiting at the pitstops for our vehicle, so we’d talk about the most bad-ass truck you could build. Then Fiesta ST, Focus ST and RS, Shelby GT350 and Ranger Raptor, among others.

I have a never-ending urge to win the Dakar Rally. That’s the one off-road race that I’ve yet to win as a part of a team. We homologated an F150 Raptor to T2 – the production class – but we never followed up with a credible motor sports programme to go with it. I am a huge believer in motor sports programmes that are tightly integrated into engineering ones.

I live in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter, which I love. Moving here from Detroit, a lot reminds me of home – many old workshops and small factories turned into residences and industrial lots. Plus I don’t cook, so there are plenty of restaurants I can walk to.

I’ve always thought that if you feel like you’ve had a long day at the office, then you’re not doing the right job. Or you’re not doing your job properly. Usually when I get home from work, I grab some food, get all of life’s necessities out of the way and sit down, look at my watch and it’s 10.30pm.

Work is my hobby. At Ford I never planned a career; I literally chose my next job based on its fun factor, and that’s served me pretty well. If you’re not having fun and doing cool stuff in your job then it’s stuff that you would pay for. I sold my Shelby GT350R when I came over here, but my Ford GT is delivered next week. It’s going to stay in America, though, or I’d probably put 20,000 miles a year on it. And it would have scratches all over it from bumping into English kerbs.

‘I’VE ALWAYS THOUGHT THAT IF YOU FEEL LIKE YOU’VE HAD A LONG DAY AT THE OFFICE, YOU’RE NOT DOING THE RIGHT JOB’