Ian Callum Designer and car collector

Best-known for his designs for Aston Martin and Jaguar, Ian Callum looks back over a distinguished career and talks about his own eclectic collection of cars

YOU KNOW YOU’RE GOING TO GET ON well with Ian Callum, designer of the Aston Martin DB7, Vanquish and DB9, and for 20 years design boss at Jaguar, when he tells you he once had a Sierra RS Cosworth as a company car while simultaneously owning a Citroën 2CV. ‘I loved that Cosworth, oh my goodness,’ enthuses Callum.

There was a certain amount of envy from the softly spoken Scot’s fellow managers at Ford, he recalls. ‘A lot of the guys asked: “How have you got that?” So I said that I’d just filled in some forms and ordered it and they could do the same. They said: “But we can’t afford it.” I replied: “I can’t afford it either!”

‘But I was a genuine car guy and I simply had to have that Cosworth. I had it for about a year and a half and went everywhere in it. It was just amazing. You were supposed to return it after six or nine months with no more than 10,000 miles on them. I kept getting letters from the company car guys saying that I had to return it – this went on for ages and I eventually handed it back with 30,000 miles on it, so I got my money’s worth.’

Callum’s fascination with cars and his passion for drawing them emerged from a very young age, he recounts. ‘From the age of about three I would draw stuff around the house – TV sets, radios, mechanical things. Then one day I decided that I loved cars. I think my grandfather may have had something to do with that as he had a keen interest in them and encouraged me. At our house in Dumfries I used to stand at the gate at the bottom of the garden and watch all the cars go by.

‘One day I saw a Porsche 356 drive past, a silver one, and I realised it was something remarkable and to my eyes very beautiful. I remember on my first day at primary school telling my teacher that when I grow up I’m going to be a car designer. She looked at me rather condescendingly and sent me back to my desk.’

There would be many setbacks in achieving that goal, but Callum had utter conviction car design was his destiny. ‘That certainty turned my younger years into a race – I had to get through all this other stuff so that I could go off and do what I really wanted to do. School was a formality I had to put up with. My school was academically driven so the idea that I wanted to study art instead of French baffled them.

‘I told them I wanted to take art and engineering, but for the life of them they couldn’t understand the connection. So I used to say to them that perhaps they should go and ask Leonardo da Vinci about it.’

With a degree of prescience, in 1968, aged

14, Callum sent some of his designs to William Heynes, Jaguar’s technical director: Heynes’ reply confirmed the need for further education in art and engineering. Explaining his interest in Jaguars, Callum says: ‘In my youth Jaguars were the most exotic cars that somehow seemed attainable.

And the E-type was the essence of style. It was an inspiration and made me want to create very stylish cars. Later on, that thought was always emotive for me as a Jaguar designer, as I tried to educate people that Jaguar is about style first and foremost.’

Regular school done and dusted, Callum enrolled at the School of Transportation and Design in Coventry, though it would prove a disheartening experience. ‘There was a fuel crisis going on and we were discouraged from designing cars,’ Callum sighs. ‘They wanted us to design other forms of transport, stuff like rollerskates, so I got little car education or car design training. Peter Stevens [car designer and now a good mate of Callum’s] came in a couple of times to show us how to draw cars, but against the backdrop of the time, it felt almost politically incorrect.’

A year into ‘this disappointing experience’ Callum quit and returned to Scotland where he did an art course in Aberdeen and then an industrial design course at the Glasgow School of Art. ‘That saved me,’ he confesses. ‘I spent three fantastic years at Glasgow and got back into my car design. I produced some good projects with thought-provoking ideas behind them.’

With his talent now shining, Callum earned sponsorship from Ford to attend the Royal College of Art’s automotive design course in London. But Callum reveals that he’d actually been hoping for a job with Vauxhall. ‘In those days Wayne Cherry was running the show at Vauxhall and had done things like the Firenza and the SRV concept car, an incredible piece of design. So I tried getting a job there and was even endorsed by Cherry to go to the Arts Centre California [America’s answer to the RCA], but Vauxhall was reluctant to employ me at that time.’

While studying at the RCA, Callum acquired his first car. ‘It was a Volvo P544 that I bought from Peter Stevens, who was a lecturer at the RCA. He’d hot-rodded the car and it had proper American mag wheels on it, although it didn’t have an engine. I found one and fitted it and thought that funny old Volvo was so cool.

‘But it only did 12 to the gallon so I couldn’t afford to run it. After that it was a Mini Clubman, 998cc, that I used to drive back to Scotland in. Then I had a Vauxhall Chevette, believe it or not. I’d fallen in love with the Chevette HS2300 – I couldn’t afford one of those but thought I could drop a 2.3 lump into a regular Chevette. You know what you’re like at that age, full of dreams…

‘A Morris Minor pickup with a Sprite engine was next, followed by a Beetle GT which again I bought off Peter Stevens – that was written off when a Mini crashed into it. I bought a Beetle convertible in Holland, did it up and then my wife and I toured Europe in it. Mad! When I joined Ford and tired of the labour that goes into old car ownership I bought a Mk1 XR2, which was a tremendous little car. I traded it in for a Mk2, a car I’d actually done some work on.’

By 1979 Callum was working full-time at Ford in Dunton, which wasn’t the dream job he’d envisioned. ‘It was a bleak, rainy day in Dunton, I’d just been given a steering wheel to design for the Transit, and I had a moment where I asked myself if this is really what I wanted to be doing. But it was all part of growing up. You go through that phase in your late teens and early 20s where you’re fighting with life and you want to make sure you fulfil your dreams properly.’

Those clouds of gloom dispersed when Callum devised a cunning plan. ‘I learnt how to make a noise – the squeaky wheel gets the most oil…

Clockwise from above: Callum’s reworking of his original Aston Vanquish; his beloved Ford Model B hot-rod, and his parents’ Ford Zephyr V4, which was early transport in his student days. Current collection includes RS2000, XJ Coupe, modified 993-gen 911, souped-up Mini, early Vanquish, and uprated TR6, which is the car he says he drives the most