Every shape on an air-cooled 911 is the residue of a decision somebody made about hardware. The hips got wide because the tires got wide. The roof falls away the way it does because the engine sits out behind the axle and has to breathe. Porsche hung a whale tail off the back of the first turbo to keep the rear right side up at speed, and when the 3.3 arrived a few years later with an air-to-air intercooler, the wing had to be reprofiled to make room for it. Nobody drew either of those shapes and then went looking for something to put underneath. The hardware moved and the bodywork followed it. That order is the whole reason a 911 looks like anything at all, and reverse it and you still get a shape. Function then form.
Singer started out answering a real question, and answered it well. The air-cooled thing had gone hot and prices were climbing, but a 964 is still a car built in 1989, and 1989 came with a crackly radio nobody wants, blown out seats, air conditioning that feels like a fan blowing over a melted ice cube, and oil on the garage floor that everybody has agreed to call character. People spending that kind of money were not signing up to suffer for it. Not everybody wants to be a martyr about it either. I have driven through Death Valley taking proud photos with a hitchhiker I picked up an hour earlier, and I am aware that this is not a sales pitch. So Singer took the analog car and deleted every reason you ever had to apologize for it. They gilded the lily of course, but that was what reimagined meant. It wasn't for me, but it was worth doing.
Until the two Louis Vuitton cars.
The craftsmanship is not what I want to argue about. Every knob and switch and vent in those cars is metal, mostly rhodium plated, hand finished with the same polishing and satin work you would put into a watch case. The instrument cluster alone took a year, redrawn so the speedometer and the tach follow the graphic language of a Tambour. There’s bumpers partially made from a tree, a varnished deck where the top folds away, paneling in the engine bay, and a fitted three-piece trunk in the nose. There is more leather on this thing than a German dungeon, edge-dyed the way they finish a bag. It’s embossed across the seats and the front boot trim in the pattern they use inside a trunk, ventilated through eyelets punched by hand into monogram flowers. Nobody on earth was going to execute better than these two companies just did. Form has taken over for function as an exercise in excess.
They gave every gram saved by carbon fiber back by installing stuff you look at. Wood is not light and neither is luggage. This is not a car with luggage in it. It has become luggage. It is a car built the way you build luggage: a shell with wood lining the compartments, leather stretched over the structure, straps and buckles holding the lids shut, every object inside cut to fit a space it never has to leave. The companies knew exactly what they were building. One of them builds it for a living.
None of this came out of nowhere. Singer's own site says their pursuit often begins with a simple question. What if we pushed the chassis further. What if we brought in Formula 1 people. What if we turbocharged it. What if it went offroad. What if we reimagined the reimagining of the reimagining. Every answer becomes the floor for the next question, and the next question has to reach past the last one or there is no reason to ask it. Reimagined, then reimagined again, then reimagined off the back of that. It is a JPEG getting copied and pasted and copied again, and eventually you lose resolution. Imagine that.
Every previous Singer started with somebody's 964, and their own site says it plainly enough on the DLS Turbo page: the process begins when the owner of a 964 sends their car in and asks for a personalized restoration. Restoration services, in collaboration with owners, a client's car going in one end. These two did not, and both companies say so proudly, because it is the first co-branded product either one has ever put its name to. That is the whole distance from reimagined to just… imagined, and it took seventeen years to cover the ground. Louis Vuitton has been stamping its monogram on objects since 1854 and was never under any obligation to know what a 964 is for. Singer was, and it went the other way, with Dickinson thanking Louis Vuitton for the specifications it chose and Singer's own chief strategy officer calling it a privilege to be trusted with the other house's 172 years of tradition. Nobody at that table was looking after the Porsche.
Singer is not alone in it either. RUF built the Rodeo on the carbon monocoque out of the SCR, gave it long travel suspension and all terrain tires and carbon ceramic brakes… and then trimmed every touchpoint in Ralph Lauren ranch patterns, embroidered the seats western style, and strapped a shovel to the back. All of it on a genuinely serious car. It seems like everybody builds one of these eventually. Even Porsche built the Dakar. It is what happens to the foundation when the engineering gets so good that the only thing left to argue over is the theme.
That foundation is not hard to find, and its not lost. A few years ago I rode with Achim Anscheidt on the autobahn outside Berlin at 145 mph in an SC he had built out of a 9,000 euro car. Two years of work. Glass swapped for polycarbonate, sheetmetal cut out of the chassis, nothing bolted back on he could not justify, 820 kilograms with every fluid in it. He was running design at Bugatti at the time, a man with every resource on earth in front of him, and what he wanted was less of the car rather than more of it. The opposite of these two cars in every way that matters.
Everything has been squeezed out of this Porsche world now. There is nowhere left above it, (please surprise me) which means either the air-cooled thing is finally finished, or somebody turns back toward the foundation the whole culture was built on.
And maybe it’s just that this thing just isn't for me, and never will be. It's for someone else entirely. Someone who likes the idea of driving, but wants the car to match his wife's purse. In the meantime I keep catching myself looking at my own 911 and wondering what I would get for it.
