This is Singer’s vision of an ultimate, air-cooled 964-generation Porsche 911. It has been developed in collaboration with Williams Advanced Engineering, and it is quite amazing. Meet the Dynamics and Lightweighting Study.
Rob Dickinson, Singer Vehicle Design’s founder, told Top Gear about the pitch for this particular project. “What would a classic Porsche 911 look like if we touched it with a Formula One team? That was the Hollywood pitch.” It’s a car that he’s been obsessing over for the last four years.
Underneath lies a normally-aspirated, 4.0-litre air-cooled Porsche flat-six. With around 500bhp. That sixer was developed by Williams with consultancy in the shape of Porsche engine wizard Hans Mezger.
“Fantastic as modern 911s are, we didn’t want to turn this into a GT3 RS, we wanted to retain the essence of the air-cooled magic, but burnish wherever it could be with this fantastic focus,” Rob told us. “It’s an absolute monster, it really is. It sounds very unusual.”
Williams completely redesigned the front and rear suspension. And the brakes (CCM-R discs, the same compound as a Bugatti Chiron). And conducted a full aero study.
We’re told every single surface on the car was assessed through CFD analysis. That engine was moved forward and some bits were relocated to the front boot, in order to provide a better chassis balance. The bodywork is full carbon fibre.
The front oil cooler and venting were redesigned, and a new front splitter was added to remove front axle lift. There is a ducktail!
The roof channel was modified to better channel the air onto that ducktail spoiler, to generate some downforce. Williams focused on torsional stiffness and the driver environment too. No more than 75 of these cars will be made. And each one will start from $1.8m.
“That’s as cheap as we can do it for the madness that’s gone into it,” Rob says. “Trust me, no one’s getting rich making these things for what it’s worth.”
On the car’s legacy? Rob had this to say: “I do think these 75 cars will be historically important in years to come. Getting this group of people together to celebrate this iconic machine, in such a focused way, with such a proper budget, won’t happen again.”
