PEOPLE SIOBHAN HUGHES,

PEOPLE SIOBHAN HUGHES, 47 Day job: Chief designer, colour & materials Spare time: I’m studying for a Business degree, but still find time to read, cycle and play badminton I ALWAYS WANTED TO BE A CAR DESIGNER BUT HOW CARS WORK WAS ALSO IMPORTANT TO ME MARK WHITE, CHIEF ENGINEER, ADVANCED BODY COLOUR & MATERIAL VIEW I ’m an exception to the art degree route into this job, I was an apprentice clay sculptor before joining the colour and materials department. That gave me a good appreciation of 3D form and helps me to compliment the inherent properties of materials – what they can and can’t do. My objective is to better integrate colour and trim strategy into the process before the designers start sketching. Materials are selected that are appropriate for the particular vehicle and customer. The designers then integrate these into the design themes, and this in turn informs the geometry. In other words, colour and materials are at the forefront of the design process. Leather samples from Siobhan’s extensive collection 24 j THE DESIGN ISSUE

MARK WHITE, 56 Day job: Chief engineer, advanced body Spare time: Listening to rock music from Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, to the Foo Fighters and Skunk Anansie EXTERIOR PERSPECTIVES WAYNE BURGESS, 47 Day job: Production design studio director Spare time: Playing lead guitar in the rock band Scattering Ashes [that is playing 2016’s Download Festival]. It’s suitably dark without being too offensive. I’m also mad on planes and visit air shows with my twin boys I t’s important to find characters like my engineering colleague and friend Mark White who feel the same passion we do. I’ll miss him when he retires shortly. When I get into the really finite details of feasibility of stamping mono side panels, that’s normally when I call Mark up and say, ‘What can we do?’ The process can take three months. The crispness of the shapes, the tightness of the corners and the sheerness of the exterior panels are all done through negotiations with Mark’s team to deliver what we’re after. On Jaguars these days it’s the width of the shoulders that presents the biggest challenge with aluminium side panels; the deeper they are, the harder it is to manufacture them. You can only stretch aluminium so far. The rear fender in the F-TYPE is actually the most sympathetic shape in terms of its simple crowned form, from a stamping point of view. The F-TYPE’s clam-shell bonnet shape The F-TYPE’s rear lip had to be very carefully sculpted to make it producible (and still beautiful) was another interesting part. It became an enabler for us to get the bonnet line and fender lower while still achieving pedestrian impact requirements. Put very simply, if you deploy the whole bonnet – including the wheel arches and fenders [to cushion and push away a pedestrian from nastier hard parts in a front-on impact] – you can drop the fenders right down because you can pop them up with pyrotechnics. A non-deploying part makes about 70mm of difference (in height), which is almost the difference between a sports car and a saloon car. It’s massive. T he first job I ever did at Jaguar was to cut the roof off the late- 80s XJ-S. It went from selling 20 a week to 130 and I’ve done every convertible since, from the XK to the F-TYPE. As a kid I always wanted to be a car designer, but how cars work was also really important to me, from aerodynamics to packaging. Design feasibility is my thing. Providing you understand aluminium’s properties, you can pretty much design anything, you just have to know how far you can wrap it around a particular shape. The fact that [former legendary Jaguar aerodynamicist] Malcolm Sayer came from the aircraft industry and worked in aluminium gave him a sympathy for the material that perhaps someone from steel and automotive wouldn’t have had. He was one of my boyhood heroes – I’ve studied every contour on the C- and D-Types and XJ13. It’s about capturing the essence of the design, translating the fluidity of the designer’s intent into a feasible stamping. We’ve actually developed new alloys, that are more formable, to deliver more complex shapes. It’s not just a case of saying we’ll work within the limitations of what we’ve got. Our goal is to protect the A-surface: how you divide the panels up, what it looks like and whether we can get away with a one-piece bodyside or need a separate rear fender. That decision comes from the surface geometry we’re given. THE DESIGN ISSUE j 25