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ind back to early October, T-minus six weeks before the launch of the I-PACE Concept and Ian Callum is in his office, with his red F-TYPE R parked in full view right outside. “It was a beautiful evening last night,” he says. “So I primed the iPhone with music and just went driving. Three hours around Warwickshire, Oxford and the Cotswolds. It was the most fantastic three hours and I did think to myself: ‘Why don’t people get this pleasure out of driving anymore?’” With Ian Callum it always comes back to the cars. Indefatigable enthusiasm for cars in general and Jaguars specifically is all part of Callum’s brand. It’s sustained him through a long and illustrious career defined by the creation of timeless, beautiful sports cars; deceptively simple silhouettes he’s gone on to translate into a range of timeless, beautiful sports saloons for Jaguar. The I-PACE Concept is, however, something altogether new: not a traditional sports car, saloon or SUV and absolutely not a traditional Jaguar. Yet his approach to its design is absolutely traditional Callum; it’s informed by a sense of history, his scholarly understanding of form language and, inevitably, that overwhelming sense of enthusiasm. “No other project I’ve worked on has given me the sheer thrill that this one did” W I-PACE CONCEPT / EXTERIOR DESIGN “People tell me they think the car is going to change,” he starts. “Well, as long as we’ve got eyes in our heads and sit the way we do in cars they’re not. What changes with a battery electric vehicle is the absence of mechanical machinery sitting in particular places. That’s the opportunity. “Now, if you give a designer a natural proportion of a sports car, they will tend towards a mid-cabin. We like the idea that people are sitting between the wheels. The old-fashioned notion was of people sitting behind the wheels, as it was with a horse and carriage. Suddenly, cars took on a completely new proportion in designers’ eyes. Mid-cabin is now the default silhouette designers want.” Callum is of course best known for front-engined cars, but he’s nothing if not unsentimental. Not to mention adamant. “My favourite is still C-X75; you work around what you have. It liberates you to be able to put the people — who set the visual volume of the car more than anything — where you want them to be, which naturally is further forward. It’s practical to do so also; you get more space between the wheels when you’re not constrained by the engine package. But also we don’t like to see a lot of mass over 12 13 IAN CALLUM DIRECTOR OF DESIGN, JAGUAR