At the London Classic Car Show in February 2019, 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.
Ian Callum on the Aston Martin DB7
This is probably the most significant car in my life, really. I left Ford after 11 years and I went to TWR with an ambition to start a new design studio where we take on the best, and we were very fortunate; after a slow start we created a design studio in an industrial unit in Oxford, and we got commissioned to look at the Aston Martin.
The project itself started off as a Jaguar, because it’s got a Jaguar platform underneath – hugely modified – but it was just a quarter of the way through when this changed. We hadn’t really designed the car at this point, we were getting the proportions right and getting the cabin forward. Being based on the XJS, we had to move things around quite considerably, so we’d engineered to that effect, and then Aston wanted a new smaller, affordable car and so we evolved the car into an Aston Martin.
We didn’t know it was going to be called DB7, of course; it was just going to be a new affordable Aston. We started with a V12 in it, but we ended up with a six-cylinder, which Walter Hayes (who was the chairman then) said was the correct thing to do. Much to my astonishment it was a huge success and it was one of the very few cars that Aston Martin made money out of [in those days].
This DB7 [on the stand, pictured above] is car one. It’s come out of the museum in Coventry. The hubcaps are there because Tom Walkinshaw wanted fat wheels like his XJS racing wheels, because aerodynamically they were better, but I wasn’t very keen because they’d put a lot of weight on the wheel.
So, I said I’ll do a wheel which is lightweight but we’ll put a cap on it, because I knew that eventually the cap would be taken off, and then there’s a nice wheel behind it.
