The Cars of Ian Callum: Jaguar XK

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 XK (X150)

So now we come to the XK. The second-generation XK was really my first all-new car that I was allowed to direct with the team, replacing the old XK. It was very challenging because the XK wasn’t broken; it was the one Jag that we felt really worked for people. The rest were quite retrospective, but the XK had a beauty about it – and I’d worked on the very last version of that with the deeper sills and the deeper front end.

Then the new XK came along [previewed by the ALC, above], and we worked it up – it’s a much bigger car than the old XK – and this was the result. We put sharp edges into it, which we’d never done. It had never been seen before on the production Jaguars, which were always very soft.

I remember when we did the very first version of this XK, the Americans [Jaguar was still owned by Ford at the time] came over and said ‘no’. I got into a lot of trouble over it, actually. They said “it’s not a Jag, it’s got creases on it”. I said “well they’re only creases to highlight certain lines. Jaguars have always had creases on them. The old XJ had a crease down the middle of the front wing and the Mark X had creases here and there… so just leave it alone”.

But they really didn’t like it because it had these creases on – “these damn creases!” they called them – but I said “well, it’s a modern car”, so I stuck my heels in and we got the car you see today.

Of course, it evolved eventually into the ultimate one, which is the XKR-S [above]. It’s one of my favourites of all the cars that I’ve worked on – and this one’s my favourite colour: French Racing Blue. We replaced this colour with, I think it’s Velocity Blue, which is a metallic version. It’s not quite as good as this; this has got a real punch to it.

Speaking of Jags with real punch, next week we move onto an even more controversial model than this creased coupé: the X351-generation XJ…