The Woodward Dream Cruise with Ian Callum

Try describing the Woodward Dream Cruise—a pulsing expression of Amer-ican automotive enthusiasm condensed into an endless, eight-lane traffic jam—and your audience will fall into one of two groups: The ones who shrug it off as inexplicable gasoline-fueled hysteria, or the ones who simply embrace it as the day-long automotive flash mob it is.

Ian Callum, principal designer for Jaguar, falls firmly in the second camp.

That's right. The man responsible for the refined F-Type—the man who has missed but one of the past 17 Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance—has the heart of an old-school hot-rodder. “I always was envious of the guys who said, 'Oh, we went to Woodward, it was really something extraordinary,'” he tells us as we crawl north along Woodward in a brand-new F-Type, “and I decided that one year, I was going to do it.”

The F-Type's recent North American sales launch gave Callum the cover to ditch Monterey and provided us with a ride for the cruise; what better way to publicize the sleek roadster than to inject it straight into the heart of American car culture?

As we crept along, we pelted the designer with questions on everything from where he sees the F-Type in a German-dominated luxury market (style preferences aside, at the end of the day, the Jaguar is simply “easier to live with than the Porsche 911”) to Cadillac's Elmiraj concept (“they should just build it”). But he couldn't resist interrupting the conversation to point out the “beautiful” “wonderful” and “lovely” lead sleds and muscle cars catching his eye. Hot rods, especially the very clean, very traditional specimens, drew the most excited response: The more extreme the chop, the deeper the channel, The more “lovely” Callum seemed to find the car—”lovely” apparently being a favorite, charmingly understated descriptor.

Callum's fascination with vintage metal is reflected in his personal garage: a 1932 Ford Coupe, a 1956 Chevy and a Mini Cooper. He's restoring and customizing a Jaguar MkII. Incredibly, it is the first Jaguar he's owned. “I'm keeping [the project] fairly quiet for now,” Callum said, but he did reveal it will “be tricked up a bit” with a bigger engine, mildly customized body and a wider stance. The new look might confound purists, but so what? “As a designer, I can't have things stock, normal. … I want to do it my way.” Be-sides, he noted, it's not like the world wants for a lack of authentically restored MkIIs.

All coming from the man responsible for moving Jaguar out of its retro-design phase and putting everything from the refined XK (“played it a bit conservative with that one”) to the sporty F-Type on the market. We take this as a sign Callum is One of Us, a true Car Guy—a genuine fanatic. He gets it. But not everyone gets it at first. “A lot of people are baffled by my lack of loyalty to a specific genre,” he explained. “I don't buy into that. At the end of the day, if you love cars, you love cars. You can pick either end of the spectrum.”

The Dream Cruise being what it is, we didn't have to drive far to find the other end of the spectrum at the Jaguar Affiliates Group of Michigan Concours d'Elegance. Held in a parking lot just off Woodward, the concours was a tiny bit of Pebble Beach's 18th green torn from Monterey and transplanted in a Detroit suburb. Clip-board-wielding gentlemen milled about, analyzing, scrutinizing and penalizing XK120s and E-types for deviations from original spec. We shuddered to think what they'd say about what Callum has in store for his MkII.

On any other day, it would have been enough to linger among the Jags, but blown big blocks and rumbling lake pipes sounded off on Woodward just yards away; Callum was eager to get back on the avenue. We didn't stick around for the awards ceremony.

After parking the F-Type, we hopped into our weapon of choice for the second run, a 1948 Willys Jeep CJ2A. It was as open-topped as the F-Type, about the only thing the two vehicles had in common. While the Jag's deep cockpit kept us somewhat isolated from the cars around us, the Jeep's bolt-upright seats and nonexistent doors offered us nowhere to hide from the sun and fumes and sounds.

It was a sensory overload to be sure, but also just what the doctor ordered. Before his megadose of American sheetmetal worship, Callum told us he was contemplating selling his '56 Chevy to free up space in his garage. Expo-sure to exhaust fumes apparently brought him back from the ledge, a Woodward Dream Cruise miracle. And we wouldn't be surprised if one or two rod-inspired elements found their way into the MkII project.

The Dream Cruise's success is difficult to understand or explain. Pitch the idea—let's all get our old cars together and idle along in the summer heat for 12 hours—and it sounds ludicrous. Detroit is known for its boulevard cruisers, not its traffic-jam crawlers. Never mind. Callum, like the million-plus other gearheads compelled to make the pilgrimage to metropolitan Detroit on the third Saturday of August, understands: You don't need much pretext to hop in your car and have a perfectly lovely afternoon.

By Graham Kozak