People
Ford performance engineer, former Jaguar Land Rover SVO Engineering Director, and founder of Hameedi Venturo
The record
Ford performance engineer who ran the 2005–06 Ford GT as programme manager, led Special Vehicle Team and Ford Performance, then spent seven years as Engineering Director of Jaguar Land Rover Special Vehicle Operations. He left Land Rover in 2025 and founded Hameedi Venturo.
Hameedi took a BSEE at Washington University in St. Louis in 1991, after SAE student projects that included a methanol Corsica and a twin-turbo natural-gas Silverado. He joined Ford the same year. Stuff later reported that he spent eight years as a race engineer with a Ford-sponsored SCORE Trophy Truck team and helped develop the powertrain that won three Baja 1000 titles. In 2010 he said he had been at Ford nineteen years and would leave when the work stopped being fun.
Road & Track records him as programme manager for the 2005–06 Ford GT; Just British dates that post from 2002. He later told the Ford GT Forum it was an eighteen-month clean-sheet programme, that the 5.4-litre V8 used Cobra R heads and Lightning forced induction, and that Ricardo’s existing transaxle was adapted rather than designed from scratch. The hardest internal fight, he said, was convincing Ford the car would sell for more than $100,000.
He became chief engineer of Ford’s Special Vehicle Team in 2005 and kept the role when Ford Performance was formed in 2013. Hot Rod identified him in January 2015 as Global Performance Vehicle Chief Engineer. He spoke for the later GT’s aerodynamics-first, clean-sheet brief; Car and Driver names Kip Ewing as that car’s chief engineer, and Ford Performance’s Matt Leaver told The Drive that Hameedi influenced every Performance product but led none specifically.
In May 2018 he left a twenty-seven-year Ford career for Jaguar Land Rover Special Vehicle Operations in England. JLR’s 2021 SV press kit and Autocar both named him Engineering Director; Goodwood called him head of SVO in 2024. Car and Driver reported in December 2025 that the Land Rover stint had just ended. He is founder of Hameedi Venturo, whose site says he led the Ford Raptor and Land Rover Defender OCTA, with Project Origine aimed at 2030.
Hameedi told Car and Driver that aerodynamics were “the tip of the spear” in the later GT’s development, from the shark nose to the movable rear wing. Hot Rod quoted his packaging explanation: the compact 3.5-litre EcoBoost V6 enabled the tapering fuselage.
He contrasted the 2005 GT’s pre-existing show-car silhouette with the later GT, which he said began as a clean sheet. Fixed seats on the carbon tub, he told Car and Driver, let the team shrink-wrap the greenhouse around known occupant positions.
On the F-150 Raptor he spent eight SCORE Trophy Truck years, then fought to replace the road-biased SVT Lightning with an off-road truck. He later told Stuff the Raptor was about suspension and chassis: “You spend every single penny you have on the chassis.”
The stations
The house
Credited through Ford Performance.
In the register
The files above are the register's own record of this name. The people index holds everyone the register credits.
In their words
“we had the show car, and we had to make the aerodynamics work within that silhouette. Here, we had a clean sheet.”
Jamal Hameedi · Car and Driver, 2015
