- The Singer DLS Turbo is a modern reinterpretation of the Porsche 934/5 endurance racer from the 1970s.
- Based on 964-generation 911s, Singer’s latest custom-built car features a carbon fiber wide body, a 700-hp twin-turbo 3.8-liter flat-six, and a manual gearbox.
- Singer offers the DLS Turbo with track- or street-oriented hardware, with the former featuring a large rear wing.
Almost every iteration of the Porsche 911 now comes with a turbocharger—in fact, you’ll pay more for one that doesn’t—but the one with the “Turbo” script on the back remains very special. Porsche isn’t the first company to adapt turbocharging for racing and road, but it’s probably the most successful. In 1977, Porsche 930 owners could drive their whale-tailed grand tourer to all eight SCCA Trans American series races and watch the racing version of the road car win a convincing six times. Singer, the proud Porsche restoration house, has now revealed a new creation that combines both into the essence of the 911 Turbo.
A 934/5 Reborn
As always, Singer is very careful to state that it is not a boutique manufacturer like RUF or Alpina, but that it simply aims to reimagine the ideals of the Porsche 911. Founded in 2009, the company now has plenty of competition but also perhaps no real competition. . In the world of classic 911s where cost is no object, the Singerized Porsche is the standard to which others strive.
Two new cars are trying to raise the already high bar somewhere into the upper ionosphere. Built in homage to the Porsche 934/5 racing machine that dominated endurance racing, the “Dynamic and Lightweighting Study (DLS) – Turbo,” is a pair of matched rockets, one built for the track, the other for the road.
Dynamics and Light Studies looks like a chapter from an aeronautical engineering textbook, but the real experience is more Top Gun: Maverick. The original DLS was created in 2008, infused with exotic composite materials and built around a naturally aspirated 4.0-liter flat-six built by Williams Advanced Engineering. The engine produces 500 horsepower at 9300 rpm and is filled with painstaking details like each individual valve costing $30,000. The entire DLS cost $1.8 million, but the limited numbers were almost immediately all spoken for.
Singer also reimagined the 911 Turbo last year, a little softer than the company’s previous projects. With a torque-rich 3.8-liter turbocharged flat-six capable of 450 horsepower, both the coupe and later the 510-hp cabriolet variant were intended to be grand tourers in the same mold as the original 911 Turbo. The six-speed manual provides two more forward gears than customers got in the 1970s.
Track or Road?
The new DLS Turbo, which has a name like a gaming mouse, combines the rigid engineering of a rebuilt F1 911 with incredible power available via forced induction. Both the Blood Orange track-focused car and the Moet Black road-oriented machine have a new twin-turbo 3.8-liter flat-six with electric exhaust doors and air-to-water intercooling. It produces an estimated 700 horsepower and spins to over 9000 rpm.
If being around the earliest Singer restorations was all about noticing fine details, both DLS Turbo models are as wild as they come. The large rear fenders balloon out as in a modern interpretation of 1970s IMSA and Le Mans racers. The road car has a duck spoiler instead of a track-focused engine box wing, but both look crazy.
The closest comparison is the Kremer K3 Street commissioned by F1 team owner Walter Wolf in 1980. However, when nearly 800 insane horsepower eats up a set of rear tires every hundred miles and only has air conditioning for the driver, Singer’s DLS Turbo build is sure to perform perfectly. as each of his previous creations.
Therefore, it is expected that, despite the cost of millions of dollars each of these cars, they really drive. After all, while the 911 Turbo is now a highly collectible car, especially the racing version, Porsche distinguished itself from the Italian exotic by building cars meant to last. One of the highest-mileage 911s in existence, a 1976 Canadian-market 930 owned by original owner Bill MacEachern of Toronto, Ontario, now has more than 800,000 miles on its odometer.
A cross-pollination between an endurance racer and a road-car, this is Singer’s wildest restored Porsche 911 to date. Bar raised, standard reset.
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Contributing editor
Brendan McAleer is a freelance writer and photographer based in North Vancouver, BC, Canada. He grew up cracking his knuckles on British cars, came of age in the golden era of compact Japanese sports performance, and began writing about cars and people in 2008. His particular interest is the intersection between man and machine, whether racing. Walter Cronkite’s career or the Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki’s half-century obsession with the Citroën 2CV. He has taught both of his daughters how to shift manual transmissions and is grateful for the reason they give him to always buy Hot Wheels.