A deep-dive into Singer Vehicle Design: CAR magazine UK heads to the California HQ and the UK centre helping to develop the Singer 911 Turbo Study
Singer 911 DLS Turbo prototype: that's a Dynamics and Lightweighting Study Making 911s great again: it's Singer's declared intentHandcrafted with love, in California. Singer craftsmanship is extrordinary► Plus a ride in prototype Turbo and DLS Turbo
A damp February day in England. Shutters rise on an industrial unit at Millbrook proving ground. Inside sit the cars being used to test the results of the Turbo andA large team mills around with bobble hats, laptops and coffees. Some are Singer’s own people, others represent those tier-one suppliers, while development driver and former 12 Hours of Sebring winner Marino Franchitti feeds back after his latest test run in the Turbo Study.
Fat 20-inch rear Cup 2s fill radical box arches in deference to Porsche’s 934/5 racers of the ’70s, perfect orange paint brings the old Jägermeister cars to mind and there’s the most gorgeously finished interior of matte carbonfibre, exquisite leather and honeycomb orange fabrics. Franchitti says he wants to build on the Turbo’s stock attributes as a quick, luxurious grand tourer that can still entertain on the twisty stuff, while simultaneously making it more user-friendly and more predictable than the standard car. ‘These Porsches are incredibly sensitive on their trailing-arm suspension and short wheelbases, so being able to refresh all those parts and bring it together with new dampers and Michelins – it’s very satisfying.
Impressive as it is, I’m also very aware I’m sitting in a work in progress – the Singer magic isn’t quite there yet. Bright strip lights are reflected in a spotless white floor, Fawaz shows me round paint booths that took forever to get through California’s strict legislation, plus bustling metal-working areas, an upholstery shop where craftspeople can stitch a three-spoke steering wheel with a single piece of thread, and leather trim samples from which buyers can request just about anything – one particularly challenging commission demanded all the colours of a sunset.
Catherine Wheel’s success saw Dickinson pivot full-time to music, but he describes a crossroads in the mid-noughties – a sense of music leaving him as an obsession and the idea of his perfect 911 taking over. Progress since has been remarkable. From Dickinson requiring two carpal tunnel surgeries because he was so hands-on with restoration work, to the step-change of OEM-style development processes in collab- oration with Williams Advanced Engineering on 2018’s Dynamics and Lightweighting Study, to the strategic nous of Fawaz, who has grasped the business side of things ‘that made me miserable’.
I spend an afternoon carving up a canyon road north of Santa Monica, smitten by the balance of supple compliance with absolute control, how it flows over this tricky surface where you’d forgive those wide tyres and its lowered suspension for fussing and snatching like a hound. The Classic Study ultimately led Singer to the DLS, to date the peak of its naturally-aspirated endeavours, with a Williams-engineered flat-six that runs all the way to 9300rpm. Now DLS, in turn, begets DLS Turbo.
This chassis set-up is an evolution of the DLS’s, notably EXE-TC dampers and front suspension with an upper wishbone and lower multi-link design, and it stays spirit-level flat and bites hard when Franchitti carves it over Millbrook’s sodden sweepers. ‘Right now it’s all about the correlation between what we’ve seen on the dyno and what we’re seeing as we start to run the car. It’s about the building blocks, gathering tonnes of data and starting to build the driva- bility of the engine, not rushing ahead,’ he explains.
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