► Singer Vehicle Design reimagines the Carrera
► The next 911 recreation is born
► Is this the new, best 911?
The greatest 911? Tough call. But until today the answer was invariably the S/T, the 60th anniversary special 911 that blended GT3 underpinnings with a cleaner, vaguely retro aesthetic. Unobtainable new and ferociously expensive now, the S/T is a beautiful little thug of a road racer. It’s also about as light as modern 911s get and uses a turbo-free 4.0-litre flat-six. Perfect, then, if a little big and digital in the modern style.
Singer’s latest restoration service, the 911 Carrera Coupe reimagined by Singer Vehicle Design, looks set to change things – and most of us a new answer to the ultimate 911 question. Pitched somewhere between the modern 911 GT3 and GTS in remit, it too fuses a high-performance, analogue character with timeless 911 curves, sort of like Porsche’s S/T. It also uses a 4.0-litre flat-six with a six-speed manual ’box and ceramic brakes. And it too would be as mesmerising carving canyons as lapping Laguna.
Only, being a restored 964, the Carrera Coupe service by Singer is both smaller and lighter than a 911 S/T, while offering scope for personalisation beyond Porsche can. And, sadly, Singer’s services are even more expensive. Every Singer commission is different, but a Carrera Coupe restoration will likely require a spare $1.5m/£1.12m, plus the donor 964 and taxes.
Singer Vehicle Design exploded into the gearhead consciousness some 15 years ago with a restoration service retrospectively dubbed the Classic, essentially a type-964 911 pulled apart and rebuilt with a level of love, care and funding that allows for the very best of everything.
In recent years, powered by the passion of main men Rob Dickinson (founder, executive chairman and creative director) and Maz Fawaz (chief strategy officer, with ex-Ford man Raj Nair now as CEO), Singer has gone supernova, upscaling its production facility (from authentic Californian hot rod shop to a vast facility with its own paint shop), establishing an ambitious engineering facility in the UK’s F1 belt and pulling together a dazzling collection of top-tier partners, including Williams, Brembo, Bosch and Red Bull technologies. Restlessly innovative, it took the flat-six engine to another level with the DLS (all built) and DLS Turbo services and introduced the ’70s 911 Turbo-inspired Classic Turbo as its main restoration offering, replacing the now closed-for-orders Classic.
All of which meant that, for the first time, Singer found itself without a naturally-aspirated offering – a crying shame given the skills, technologies and engineering solutions it’d developed during the DLS, DLS Turbo and Classic Turbo projects, including state-of-the-art new Bosch traction and stability control systems, not to mention a six-speed Riccardo gearbox and new solutions to improve the stiffness and consistency of its restored 964 monocoques. Hence this car, the restoration service Dickinson and Fawaz consider the pick of their body of work to date: the 911 reimagined by Singer Carrera Coupe.
The body and exterior design shares much with the Classic Turbo’s silhouette, albeit trading that service’s ’70s Turbo inspiration for a look that riffs hard on the rare wide-bodied Carreras Porsche offered in the ’80s while also incorporating Singer’s now-trademark stance, broad-hipped muscularity and artisanal attention to detail. And where the Classic Turbo restoration offers a modicum of refinement and touring ability, the Carrera Coupe is closer to Dickinson’s original mission statement for the Classic: ‘look great, be built like a Rolex and go down the road like a f*cking weapon.’ Deliberately rawer and more alive in character, the Carrera Coupe restorations are intended for fast road and track use – a ‘big-hearted, naturally-aspirated sports car’, limited to 100 units.
As per Singer’s mission statement – ‘everything is important’ – the turbo-free flat-six is a work of art, technically and aesthetically. To see the thing, complete with its almost Art Deco cooling fan/intake plenum installation, is to wonder if the word ’engine’ might lack the scope to do it justice. Where the DLS restorations leant on Williams and its ability to deliver the savage revs and power required, Singer worked with Cosworth to hatch this new 4.0-litre motor.
The specification is wild; like updating a Spitfire with autopilot, ram jets and onboard Wi-Fi: four valves-per-cylinder (for 414hp and a broad spread of torque), liquid-cooled heads with air-cooled cylinders, that six-speed gearbox (complete with DLS-style exposed shift linkage) and the promise of a soundtrack to shred your ears and swell your heart – all the way to 8000rpm and beyond.
‘Mature is the word that comes to mind for the engine and really for the whole car,’ explains Fawaz. ‘Development for the Classic Turbo service was comprehensive. We got into everything, and we approached this project using all of the collective things we’ve learned along the way. And with this engine we had very specific ideas of what we wanted to do with it. It wasn’t like we went to Cosworth, gave them a horsepower figure and asked them to sort it out. We want to do something very specific; very torquey for road use, very smooth, and we wanted the emissions controls [to make this a truly global motor] in place on every engine. Doing that while retaining the torque and the power… that’s when we decided to add variable valve timing. It’s not a new thing, of course, but it’s new for us.’
The cooling fan, being electric rather than belt-driven (it was developed during the DLS R&D), was free to be re-positioning, for better packaging and to more democratically cool all six cylinders. And while Cosworth set down the basic volumes and shapes for the plenums, Dickinson’s design team then massaged them into the Tate-worthy sculpture you see here, including subtly different curves to the two sets of runners to negate the cylinder offset and make the plenums symmetrical.
The engine mounts into a monocoque restored to a level of rigidity appropriate for a car this fast and this focused. On top of Singer’s usual welding work, composite and steel reinforcements have been created in association with Red Bull Advanced Technologies and its world-class simulation and structural analysis facilities. Four-way adjustable dampers (remotely, from the cockpit), ceramic brakes and 18-inch centre-lock wheels mounting Michelin Pilot Sport rubber complete the chassis spec. Options include two styles of front end and rear wing – restrained or high-downforce; your call – a trunk for aero parts you’re not using that day, and auxiliary driving lamps that rise from the bonnet when required and fold down flush when not in use.
The design was 18 months in the making, with Dickinson sweating all the stuff, big and small. And if this might just be his perfect 911 well, that’s probably no accident. And why not? This wild ride started with a car he built for himself, and that he could have sold scores of times over. Ideas that make his heart flutter will almost certainly do the same for Singer’s loyal client base.
‘Fifteen years ago, if you’d put a gun to my head and asked me what my perfect 911 would be, I’d have told you it was a normally-aspirated F model with muscular bodywork – flared fenders but without the more conspicuous aerodynamic stuff – that maybe tipped its hat to the ST from 1971,’ explains Dickinson. ‘Seventeen years on, as an old man of nearly 60, I‘d like to be sitting on corduroy [it’s an option, and it looks sweet] in something that’s fast, lightweight and punchy in the midrange.’ And now, for a fortunate few, Rob and Maz included, that dream will be made metal (and corduroy).