BECOMING A CHIEF VEHICLE ENGINEER and being responsible for a whole car is a position that only a handful of automotive engineers get to enjoy. To lead a team and deliver a car that also hits or exceeds the brief is therefore a great achievement. To do that three times and then, after delivering each one, go off to do something completely different suggests a restless and healthy curiosity.
That hunger for new challenges has certainly served David Twohig well in the course of his career to date. Three of the major projects he's led have been diverse and, in their own ways, successful: a small crossover that saved a company, a big-selling EV hatchback before EVs became popular, and a sensational lightweight sports car from a firm that was reluctant to see said car through to production.
We meet Twohig at ItalDesign in late May, doing what he does these days: offering his engineering insight and guidance. Usually it's behind the scenes and a water-tight NDA, but this project is different. We're in Turin to see the full-size clay of the all-new Caterham Project V (see page 24) and Twohig has been brought in by Bob Laishley, Caterham's CEO, to offer an expert eye on the project. Laishley and Twohig go back a long way having worked together at Nissan, and Laishley is keen for the benefit of Twohig's broad experience.
For Twohig, born and brought up in Cork, in the south of Ireland, Nissan was his first home as an engineer. Did he always think he'd go into engineering? 'Yeah, I was one of those horribly predictable kids,' he says. 'My dad was a car nut, my older brother was a car nut, my earliest memories are passing spanners to my dad who was fixing some crappy old Ford. My dad was a frustrated engineer. His generation never got a chance to go to college, so I guess he was living that vicariously through me. Being an engineer is all I've wanted to do... apart from a brief spell of wanting to be Tom Cruise in Top Gun when I was 16.'
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