Mr Mustangles
Meet the Scottish design guru behind what might be the sexiest pony car yet
MY beige office phone rings and I answer it with dread. Normally I don’t answer, because the voice at the other end of the line is usually either a shifty telesalesman or one of our older readers calling to complain about my habit of starting sentences with conjunctions. But fortunately it is neither. “Hey Tom,” asks the voice of a familiar PR officer, “how would you fancy a one-on-one interview with Mr Moray Callum?”
I don’t know who the hell Moray Callum is, but he sounds important, so I duly accept the offer and rock up a few hours later with a notepad and voice recorder.
It turns out that 56-year-old Moray Callum is the younger brother of Ian Callum, who has filled the world with exotic poster cars such as the Aston Martin DB9 and Jaguar F-Type. Moray (that’s pronounced “Murray”, by the way, and has absolutely nothing to do with the viscous eel) also decided to pursue a career in car styling after he graduated from Edinburgh’s Napier University with a bachelor’s degree in industrial design. Beefed up by a master’s degree in transportation design after a stint at the Royal College of Art in London, Callum minor got his first gig working with the Chrysler Corporation 1982.
“I have always been interested in both engineering and aesthetics,” he says over a cup of coffee in a swish Sandton conference room. “And I think design really puts both of these together.”
Although dressed in a dapper charcoal business suit, Moray Callum cuts a pretty benign figure. He is reasonably well fed, of average height and wears all the facial expressions of a mischievous uncle, the kind who, when you were a teenager, would sneak you a generous glass of Scotch at the annual family Christmas gathering against your father’s wishes.
Comb through his career, however, and you will discover that he has been responsible for transforming the face of illustrious brands such as Mazda. Beneath that jolly façade lies a sharp blade of steely acumen; one that’s helped cut the third-generation MX-5 roadster, the CX-7 crossover and the nippy Mazda2 hatchback.
Callum would have every right to be a bit complacent, but he isn’t. “I think I am still learning,” he says, unfolding his fingers. “At first you’re influenced by other cars, you’re influenced by the history of cars, and I think you learn that it’s not just about that. It’s about how people interact with the product and how people will react to the product. I respect cars that have been really innovative but also functional.”
As such it’s no surprise that he holds both the original Mini Cooper and the Citroën DS in extremely high regard. “Although they made fantastic visual statements,” he says, “they were still very practical vehicles.”
Callum, who hails from Dumfries, Scotland, and now lives in Dearborn, Michigan, calls everyday family cars the hardest models to design. Getting them to make some kind of a statement is apparently a real challenge.
Personally I think his most recent project, shaping the 2015 Mustang to suit the tastes of a new global audience, must have been even tougher. Terrifying really. A quintessential American icon right up there with the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Fender Stratocasters and warm apple pie, Ford’s legendary pony car isn’t something you can afford to bungle. Callum was in the hot seat. Especially since the last model, launched in 2006, had been so successful.
Fortunately Callum is a man who understands the Mustang and certainly appreciates its enviable brand cachet. He himself owns a menacing black 1967 GT390 fastback remarkably similar to the one used in Peter Yates’s cult crime thriller, Bullitt. Throughout the interview he makes references to Steve McQueen, who has almost become a human metaphor for the machine’s cool, freewheeling image of assertive independence. He’s fully aware that the past has to somehow remain part of the future.
“We wanted to please everybody in a way,” he says. “To keep the traditionalists but at the same time attract a wider audience . . . If you ask a Mustang consumer or connoisseur what makes a Mustang a Mustang, he will give you a list of elements. And our job this time around was to put all of these together and then start editing them somehow. We needed to make this car fresh and new and ready for the 21st century. It was a challenge to keep the elements that you instantly recognise as a Mustang but still make people, especially in the US, say, ‘Oh, it’s a new Mustang.’”
After seeing the car in the flesh I think Callum got the balance right. Those Tri-Bar taillights. The slanted shark nose. That classic fastback sil- houette (its creator’s favourite part, by the way). All the requisite ingredients are there and yet it doesn’t feel in any way contrived from a retro point of view.
“From a visual standpoint and from a proportional standpoint we wanted to make it a more legitimate sports car,” Callum says. “So we worked a lot on the proportions — lowering the car, sort of sucking in the shape of the sheet metal to make it seem really vacuumwrapped around its mechanicals. In a way this helped how the rest of the world wanted to see the car because there is, you know, there is that sort of danger of it being the ‘Neanderthal American’, and we really wanted to avoid that.”
John Wayne on steroids and double cheese. This seems to characterise the design template adopted by most players in the current pony car/muscle car revival. The Dodge Charger, the Dodge Challenger and, of course, the Chevrolet Camaro — that bow-tied thorn forever stuck in the Mustang’s rump. Stateside it has been outselling the Ford thanks to its angular, more aggressive sheet metal.
Strangely, it’s a threat that Cal- lum doesn’t seem fussed about. “Even if you go back in history the Mustang wasn’t really the muscle car — it was the pony car. So we purposefully didn’t go after Camaro. We see our car less as Schwarzenegger and more as McQueen — lively and fit. You know that it can deliver but it doesn’t deliver through bulk. And that was one of our premises going forward.”
With so many elements and so much history to consider, Callum must surely be a bit obsessive compulsive inside the design studio.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so,” he laughs. “But I suppose any obsessive compulsive would never admit to being so — because it’s not obsession, it’s what needs to be done. There are very few bad designs out there these days and we’ve got a lot of strong competition. So we need to show that Ford is continuing to evolve in terms of design language but also delivering technology and aspects of the whole car that people want and expect — and know how to use as well. It’s a challenge but it’s a fun challenge.”
The conference door opens and the PR informs me that I’m out of time. Ford’s vice president of design has to prepare for the next grilling. I shake his hand and thank him for the interview.
“You’re welcome,” he says. “If you’re ever in Detroit again, look me up — I might show you the ’67.” Moray Callum. Enthusiast. Automotive architect. All-round thoroughly decent guy. I’m glad I picked up that phone. LS @tomfalkiner111