The Cars of Ian Callum: Jaguar R-D6 concept

At the London Classic Car Show in February of this year, Jaguar design director Ian Callum was selected to receive an ‘Icon Award’ to commemorate his illustrious career designing some of the world’s most iconic cars.

Car Design News got some exclusive time with Mr Callum at the show’s dedicated stand, where he gave us the story behind all 11 of the cars present – and one or two prototypes that weren’t.

One of Ian Callum’s cars will be covered each Monday for 11 weeks. Enjoy.

Ian Callum on the Jaguar R-D6 concept

While I was working on this, Julian Thompson and I said “we’ve gotta start getting the new Jaguar design language working,” and we did a project called the R-Coupé – which was a kind of XJC replacement in our minds. We used the oval front grille because we wanted to make it recognisable as a Jaguar and that had become the ‘face’ at that time, with the S-Type.

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But I said that I wanted to do a small car, and we also had to do a car which signified the new diesel engine, the V6 which we’d been developing with Peugeot-Citroën, so this car has a V6 diesel in it. I love small cars. I wanted to introduce something which was indefinable as a car, in terms of ‘is it a sports car, is it a hatchback?’

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So, we should’ve perhaps built this car – to my mind this was the X-Type replacement – and yeah it’s quite exotic, it’s got the big wheels and so on, but it picks up all the essence of where Jaguar was going to go. It was going to be a while before we got the chance to replace any of the cars out then – the X-Type had just come out, the XJ had just been launched – so I said that we need to signify a change is coming. This car was part of that story.

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I worked with the team on this for about a year, and it was shown at Frankfurt in 2003. It was quite something at the time, with the flip-out ‘coach doors’ (as we call them nowadays). We really liked it.

I drove this car up Goodwood hill, and I took off at the start, and um, I wanted to have some fun, so I pushed it into the first corner… and the car went completely sideways because I’d completely forgotten that these are not real, properly developed tyres; they were just hand-cut show tyres, so the thing had no grip at all! Nearly lost about one-and-a-half million quid’s worth of motor car…

[We then asked Mr. Callum if he thought any of the R-D6 hatchback’s design DNA – particularly the roof and rear ¾ – made it through to the I-Pace]

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Yes, definitely… so we got some of it through to production in the end! Especially towards the back.

At the front, clearly we wanted to use the twin headlamps, and you see how the headlamps evolved from this onto the XF after that, and then eventually the XF that we know today. We also put the more traditional grille in again, because we wanted people to recognise that it’s a Jag.

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But after we’d done this, I said to the team, I said to Julian: I want to get rid of this grille. It’s just too retro, and we wanted to move away from that, so the XF was the next car we did (it came out as the C-XF which we probably over-promised on) and then the production XF had the square grille which was inspired by the original XJ grille – so there’s a story there as well.

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Next Monday, it’s back to the two-door coupé body style (although, this one does also have a hatchback tailgate): the Jaguar XK.