Exclusive Porsche ‘Re-Imaginer’ Singer Has A New Model And It’s A Design Disaster

Just over four years ago, I was deciding what interesting car I might buy with the small ill-gotten windfall that had just landed in bank account. I wanted something I could drive and enjoy that wouldn’t be a complete ball ache to run, lose any money and should financial ruin become a possibility, be easy to sell on. Despite my feigned ambivalence, once the prospect of owning one became a possibility, the siren call of the 911 was hard to tune out. As long as it was air-cooled, manual and preferably black. A Targa or cabriolet would be fine – I am an incorrigible show off after all.

Being the least desirable versions, my internal classic car value-o-meter told me roofless versions of the 911 should be under forty grand, right? Wrong. Flipping open the laptop revealed I could just about get a Tiptronic 964 with a spotty history, moon-shot mileage and questionable color choices for just under fifty. Recalibrating my search, I found a black on black, late 930 Targa for £33k ($44.5k). It sold before I could pick up the phone.

As I write this on Thursday afternoon out of the 34 964s listed on Pistonheads (the UK’s main specialist and classic car sales and auction site) 27 are near or over £100k ($135k) – some significantly so, including Targas. According to Wikipedia Porsche built 63,762 of the things so they’re not exactly unicorns. Aside from the tech/finance bro classic car bubble what the hell is driving the prices of these ass-engined coupes into the stratosphere? The Singer Tax.

Happy Days

Singer was formed in 2009 by ex-Catherine Wheel singer Rob Dickenson, born of his obsession with the 911. After hand building and restoring a few cars by 2014 he was ready to pack the whole thing in. According to Car Magazine:

‘We’d done 13 or 14 cars, people were saying nice things and clients knew they were proper. But orders were trickling in, they were ferociously expensive cars to re- store and we were losing money on every single one of them,’ he reveals. ‘In 2014 or 2015 I said, “Right, why don’t we give up?”’

What Dickenson did instead was what so many small automotive startups and cottage builders with big dreams fail to do. Get in a professional CEO who knows what the fuck they are doing. Operations were grown and streamlined into a new a facility in Torrance Ca which employs over 600 people. Singer has now restored over 380 cars at least $900k a pop. Thus the prices of original 911s have been dragged ever upwards and encouraged other companies such as Theon to want a piece of the 911 restomod pie as well. So if you can’t buy the affordable 911 of your dreams, you know who to blame.

This morning’s press release instructs us to refer to this latest model as the Porsche 911 Reimagined by Singer – DLS Turbo, which infers busy fax machines in the offices of lawyers in both Stuttgart and Torrance. Mouthful nomenclature aside, what we have here is the first customer car – built entirely to the client’s requirements.

As with every Porsche 911 Reimagined by Singer, Sorcerer (the client’s name for the car – AC) has been personalized by its owner, according to their individual requirements.

Specification overview:
Type 964 chassis
Lightweight carbon fibre bodywork in Fantasia Blue with track-focused configuration
3.8L, four-valves per cylinder, twin-turbocharged flat-six with electrically powered fan
Six-speed manual transmission
Rear-wheel drive
Carbon-ceramic braking system
Lightweight 19” (front) and 20” (rear) forged magnesium, centre-lock wheels.
Interior in Pebble Grey leather and Pearl Grey Alcantara with Champagne trim
Nose lift, air-conditioning, navigation, and Car Play connectivity

So far, so “is your checkbook open sir?” I’ve not especially got a problem with this part of the equation. Even us regular people are not above wanting to personalize our own comparative shitboxes to our needs and desires. I’ve swapped half the interior of my fifteen year old Mini, for example. No, my problem with the Porsche 911 Reimagined by Singer – DLS Turbo is the way it looks. Because any subtlety in the classic 911 shape has been mutilated on the altar of heritage. Again, directly from the press release because as you I know I never want to upset anyone:

Sorcerer is restored around the original Type 964 monocoque, augmented with chassis strengthening, and wears lightweight carbon fibre bodywork, inspired by the rare 934.5 endurance racer from the late 1970s.

The 934.5 was created by smashing together two similar, but separate racing 911s – the road based Group 4 934 and the flat nosed, box arched Le Mans winning Group 5 935. The result was a horrid Frankstein that appeared to be constructed from the back and front halves of two completely different cars. Because that’s exactly what it was. Now that’s fine for motor racing where engineering and regulatory expedience trump aesthetics. The Brawn BGP 001 isn’t winning any beauty prizes but it doesn’t matter because that’s not the point of it. You can’t just take A, combine it with B and proclaim the result as heritage inspired design. It’s about taking and refining what is appropriate, not applying historical elements with a blunderbuss. When you lean into your racing past and transpose those engineering necessities onto a road car they look more out of place than that weird utensil in your kitchen drawer whose purpose you’ve forgotten.

Is A 911 By Any Other Name As Sweet?

The Porsche 911 Reimagined by Singer – DLS Turbo looks like a standard car has backed full speed into an outsize cereal box and driven off again with it still attached. Where the hell did that rear wing come from? Boeing? You’d need clearance from ATC before driving this anywhere near an airport. I can only assume the purpose of it, and the outsized jutting splitter at the front, are to keep drooling smartphone wielders a safe distance from the rest of the expensive carbon fiber bodywork.

Also residing firmly in the ‘overdone elements’ part of the design are the wheels, which are 19” at the front and 20” at the back. You can’t take modern wheel sizes and slap them on what is essentially a car from 1964, because the basic shell was never designed around that sized wheel in the first place. Muscle car restomods are guilty of this crime all the fucking time and it looks stupid. It’s like a leprechaun wearing seventies sized roller skates. Bigger is not automatically better. The craftsmanship and finish on display here is no doubt exquisite. It’s the cartoon execution that bothers me, especially since Dickinson (as well as being related to Brexit blowhard and Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson) is a trained car designer having been hired by Peter Stevens to work at Lotus.

This thing probably cost the owner more than $3 million – and despite having handling developed by Marino Franchitti you cannot tell me it is six times the driving experience of the Sportklasse 911 I drove a couple of years back. I get why cars like exist – they allow high net worth individuals to play car designer, picking out color and trim, deciding on finishes and materials and deciding on their chosen mechanical specification. And rich people commissioning one offs goes back to the dawn of the automobile at the turn of the last century.

But my feeling is there’s a Bridezilla element to all this – getting swept in the process and then a feeling of crushing anti-climax after the event when it’s all over. You’re rattling about in a loveless McMansion drinking wine from a box, or in the case of a Singer, with an un-drivable three million dollar bauble.

Which may be why six of the 34 964s currently listed for sale on Pistonheads are Singers.

(Unless otherwise stated all images Singer.)