Seat design chief talks SC

"We don't believe that emotion equals aggressiveness," Alejandro Mesonero-Romanos tells TG.com. "Some of our competitors are really aggressive, but I believe Seat is about strength."

We're sat at the Shanghai Motor Show, where the delightful new Leon SC has made its Chinese premiere. You'll remember this car - you lot were rather taken with it upon its Geneva Motor Show unveil barely two months back, so we thought it a good time to sit down with the Seat design chief on how it was born.

"For me, great proportions are the key," he explains. "I would say 60 to 70 per cent of a nice car - and the success of a car - is the proportions. Look at the SC's raked roof, the inclined rear window and strong shoulders, these are the elements of great proportion."

And this was helped in no small part by the highly publicised and almost impossible to pronounce Modularer Querbaukasten platform - the underpinnings of some ten million VW Group products for the coming future. "I have worked for other brands in the past with different platforms that weren't very good," he says, "but in this case the platform gave us the perfect proportion - the height, the length and the width - but also the position of the wheels compared to the body, with short overhangs.

"It's like getting the right skeleton for a fashion designer, getting the right proportion for a man or a woman, to make a suit. It makes all the difference. The suit can be very nice, but if the proportion of the person is not good, then it's not going to look good."

We reckon the Cupra version of this SC will look rather delightful when it appears too. "Of course there will be some compromises with the roominess, the practicality, but this time the needle is much more rooted in emotion," he says, cryptically. "At Seat we believe that one of the main reasons to choose a car is because you have to fall in love with it, and the SC is our main car for that."

So where does Seat's design future lay? "If you talk inspiration, then personally I am very curious about everything. The new Leon is a starting point of our new design language, and we would like to continue on this line. Obviously I can't share many new details, but we like the shapes that really take the light and shadow in a strong way. You'll see more and more sculpture - fewer lines, but every line we put there has to be the right one. "

Any handy Internet-smiths out there reckon you can mock up what the next Leon Cupra SC will look like based on what Alejandro explains above? We'll give out free Internet points to the winner*...

*Currently not redeemable for anything of value in this galaxy or any other. Sorry, we spent all of our budget on crisps