The Insane 700-Horsepower Singer DLS Turbo Is A Road-Legal Tribute To ’70s Endurance Racing

Just as it felt like the modified Porsche 911 craze was tapering off, the restomod wizards at Singer have gone completely mental. This is the Singer DLS Turbo, a tribute to one of Porsche’s greatest-ever racing cars boosted to the nth degree. It’s pretty damn close to an IMSA Group 4 racer for the road, except it has even more power than the original.

This high-end restomod may look properly old, but it’s still more powerful than any brand new Porsche 911 you can possibly place a deposit on. Stowed under the rear deck sits an in-house 3.8-liter air-cooled flat six with not one, but two turbochargers bolted on. The result? A full 700 horsepower and more than 9,000 rpm in a car roughly the size of a honeymoon suite Jacuzzi.

All that rocketry makes it way to the rear Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2 tires through a six-speed manual gearbox with an exposed linkage so exquisite, you could sneak it into the MoMA and it would take weeks for people to catch on. Mind you, the interior that Singer is demonstrating happens to be more orange than Garfield, so it’s easy to miss this sensational shifter at first glance.

As with every Singer vehicle, the DLS Turbo starts with a Porsche 964, but it doesn’t end up looking anything like a stockbroker’s chariot from the early ‘90s. Instead, it gets coachwork inspired by the Porsche 934/5, a racing special so potent that it was banned by IMSA before it ever got a chance to compete under that sanctioning body. Not content with scrapping the project, teams took the 934/5 racing in the 1977 SCCA Trans-Am series where it dominated the podium, a solid track record for a car built to exploit a rule change in a completely different series.

To be fair, the turbocharged 934/5 was a hilariously overpowered mix of Group 4 and Group 5 parts, hence the name. Porsche used the engine and chassis from the 934 Group 4 car but the wheels, tires, widened rear bodywork, and gigantic wing from the 935, a rulebook stretcher in itself. Unsurprisingly, the resulting chimera looked absolutely insane, with rear fenders the size of kitchen cabinets, and the Singer DLS Turbo leans all the way into it.

If customers don’t want the full Monty, the rear picnic table can be swapped out for a little ducktail and the front air dam can be replaced with a smaller piece. However, if you’re going to spend this sort of money on a reimagined 911, you just have to go for the full Moby Dick all the time. It’s a car with two commas in its price tag, pull out all the stops. Get the turbofans and ludicrous aerodynamic aids and enough orange to suggest German liqueur affiliation. Own a four-wheeled expletive nutty enough to make a Pagani Huayra look tame. Whatever you do, don’t be boring.

With modern tires, modern suspension, and modern brakes, the Singer DLS Turbo should be less scary than an original 934/5, but sharing a telephone booth with a starving, irate grizzly bear also sounds less scary than a 934/5. You’re still dealing with a 30-year-old donor car draped in carbon fiber panels and bestowed with more firepower than North Korea.

As is usual with high-end builds like this, production is limited and the price tag lives in “if you have to ask” territory, but whatever small nation’s GDP Singer lands on might just be worth it. It’s the sort of machine that would make grown adults with Roth IRAs and mortgages squeal with delight upon merely spotting it in the wild, and can a price really be put on joy? Surely it’s more sensible than spending $1.2 million on a 996.

(Photo credits: Singer Vehicle Design)

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