A German Car That Speaks Italian

Some cars are designed by committee. This one was designed the way a song gets written — alone, for an audience of one. The Porsche 911 Carrera Coupé Reimagined by Singer belongs firmly to the latter.
Founder and executive chairman Rob Dickinson fronted a rock band long before he ever reimagined a 911, and he is unusually candid about where his cars actually come from. "Our cars are not built by committee," he says. "When you write a song, you're writing it for yourself. Every car we've done is the car I want on my driveway." It is exactly that refusal to design for anyone else that has made Singer the most coveted name in air-cooled Porsche.
The new Coupé celebrates a specific, half-forgotten moment: the 1980s, when you could order a 911 wrapped in the muscular wide bodywork of the Turbo, but powered by a naturally aspirated engine. After two or three years of offering only turbocharged cars, Dickinson wanted to give his followers that raw, un-boosted voice back. So Singer built a new one — a 4.0-litre flat-six developed with Cosworth over eighteen months, built around the original 964 crankcase, now making 420 horsepower and singing toward 8,000 rpm. It is, he admits without hesitation, his favourite detail on the entire car. "This is the heart of any 911."
Then there is the interior — and here the German car suddenly speaks Italian. Dickinson asked a simple question: what would these cabins look like if Loro Piana had made them? He answered it with burnished leather seams, the marque's first use of corduroy, a shade called Dusty Pink, and a blue named after the Passalacqua hotel on Lake Como. Effortlessly chic, he calls it. Sporting, but elegant — and, he hopes, still appropriate for a German car.
Ask him to picture it in motion and the musician resurfaces. He sees the Dolomites, a great James Bond theme on the stereo, big strings, big drama. "It's a big-moments car," he says — a grand tourer and a real driver's car at once, somewhere between a 911 GTS and a GT3, and endlessly specifiable, from maximum luxury to maximum sporting intent.
Pink corduroy, Passalacqua blue, the mountains ahead. That, Dickinson says, is precisely how he would build his own. And he'd drive it every single day.