Presenting: The Singer Porsche 911

He first did this for himself, putting a 1979 engine into the chassis of a 1969 911 for his daily driving car. Other people wanted to buy it, he didn’t want to sell it, so he decided to make versions for others. Singer was born.

Now, if you want a Singer 911 you have to source your own car, a 964 911, naturally. Then you give the car to Singer. And you wait ten months before you see your finished Porsche 911. It will be the same, but very different.

Singer has a workforce of around 50 and each car takes 4000 man-hours to restore. Naturally, everything is restored to original if not better. But it will also be modernised in a very careful way. For example there will be air-con and sat-nav, but the air-con button is blended in with the original dashboard and the sat-nav screen only emerges into view when you need it. And there is one of Singer’s signature design traits – the rev counter going up to 11,000rpm.

There is fabulous attention to detail, and it extends to the engine as well of course. The original 964 had a 3.6-litre flat six pumping out 222bhp. Singer 911s can come with either a 3.8-litre flat six, tuned by Cosworth to give 345bhp, or there is also the option of a 4.0-litre flat six that gives a “conservative” 385bhp.

That is real-world power. A 4.0-litre Singer, driven by a customer, lapped the Laguna Seca circuit in the USA recently only two seconds behind the McLaren P1’s lap time.

These hand-built, exclusive 911s don’t come cheap of course. There have only been around 24 made since 2009, and prices start at £250,000, plus the donor vehicle. This exclusivity is not about to change any time soon, although there are plans for expansion.

There are also plans for some surprises too. Dickinson says: “We intend to prove to the world in the next two years that we’re not one-trick ponies, but Singer will remain very Porsche-centric.”