INTERVIEW: Singer founder Rob Dickinson on the company's past present and future

For its tenth consecutive appearance at FOS, Singer revealed its new Porsche 911 Carrera Coupe Reimagined by Singer (to use its official lengthy title) both on the Hill and on static display. It was the perfect opportunity to speak to Singer founder Rob Dickinson about what makes the company tick. I started by asking him how they decide the character of a new model versus those that have come before. 

“I’m not sure we think about it so strategically, to be honest with you. There is a business plan, of course, there has to be, but for us, it’s slowly working through the cars that we want on our driveway. That’s as far as the product planning committee goes.”

What sets the new car apart from its immediate predecessors is a move back to natural aspiration. “We’ve been offering only turbocharged cars since we stopped taking commissions for our Classic two and half or three years ago,” says Dickinson.

“The turbos have been fantastic. They seem very popular, which is wonderful, but a lot of people are crying out, as are we, for another naturally-aspirated engine. And we wanted to do that because we knew that the opportunity was there to do something that no-one had done before, which is always interesting to us.”

That new ground was variable valve timing for the Metzger engine, and Singer worked with Cosworth to make it happen. “We wanted a 400-plus horsepower engine that met all emissions requirements across the world. Crucially, it would also have prodigious mid-range torque and would rev its nuts off at the same time. Working with Cosworth was a partnership made in heaven. It’s one of the most exciting engines that we’ve ever made.” As well as being the first Singer to have variable valve timing, it’s the first naturally aspirated engine to have water-cooled cylinder heads. It takes lessons learned from the DLS Turbo.

The 4.0-litre flat-six produces 425PS (319kW) and redlines at 8,000rpm. While that’s intended to encourage drivers to explore its upper limits, it also has more torque than previous offerings. It’s intended to be a more sophisticated road car that could be used daily. Is such regular use likely, I wondered? “We have cars with lots of miles on them and cars that haven’t turned a wheel,” says Dickinson. “Proportionally, I’d say 40 or 50 per cent of customers really use their cars – passionately, as well.”

To compare Singer’s new offering to the current Porsche 911 line-up, it would spiritually sit somewhere between the GTS and GT3. It would need the right body to match its engine, and Dickinson conceived the idea of making reference to the Turbo-look Super Sport of the 1980s. “The M491 option that Porsche offered in the ’80s meant you could specify your new 911 with the pumped-up body work of the Turbo, but within the latest normally-aspirated engine. So that’s what this is, really – a muscular, normally-aspirated G model.”

You know you’re in safe hands when historic Porsche model codes come into conversation. And Dickinson is the real deal when it comes to 911 geekery having owned a few in the 1990s. After studying car design at Coventry University in the ’80s, he landed a job at Lotus but left that after just a few months to pursue a music career. “I waved goodbye to car design but my passion for cars just went through the roof,” he says. “Circumstances had me living in Los Angeles in 2003, making a record, and all I wanted to do was build my own perfect 911. That led to me building my own car, and that car was the genesis of Singer.”

He still owns that first car now, and it really was the start of what we see today. “This idea percolated in my brain that somewhere there’s a perfect air-cooled Porsche 911, and it has more appeal to a mainstream audience than just me as a 911 nerd. That was the eureka moment for me.” Singer was founded in 2008.

While the aesthetic and craftsmanship is the most obvious visual element of a Singer, the way they drive is key to their appeal. “A lot of our clients now are totally unfamiliar with how an old Porsche 911 ever drove,” says Dickinson. While very few customers come to Singer having never owned a 911 before, most of them own much more modern interpretations of the breed. He continues: “They haven’t driven a ’73 RS or 1969 911 S. They get in our little car and it blows their minds as to what an old Porsche 911 can do, having stepped out of their GT3 or whatever they’ve stepped out of. They realise, ‘Everything I do in this car is scalpel sharp,’ and it’s a revelation for a lot of these guys.”

While we’re able to see the car in action on the Hill, there’s no opportunity to feel how the Carrera Coupe Reimagined by Singer goes down to the road so we’ll satisfy ourselves with drinking in the aesthetic. Every detail is a joy, including the new pop-up headlights that retract at a touch of button to be sealed off with covers that fit perfectly flush to the bonnet. Even the engine is a thing of beauty, the flat-six dressed with bespoke carbon-fibre where the electric fans have been relocated above the engine.

The interior is captivating, too. The level of detailing is from another world, while the stitched and burnished leather seams for the velvet corduroy cloth upholstery take 400 hours to complete. There’s an almost incomprehensible amount of work that goes into creating each car, and making it hold up as a business has been a challenge for the last 17 years. 

“We charged $300,000 for the first car, and it cost us over a million dollars to make,” says Dickinson. “We’d come up with something that people like, but how are we going to give it to them at some kind of price that’s acceptable? We’ve spent the last 17 years trying to figure that out. And I would say we’re still figuring out. To build cars that have such astronomical ambition in their quality, it’s kind of a stupid way to try and make a living. The margins on the car are ridiculously small even at the heady prices we have to demand. 

“But that’s kind of not the point. The point was to build a name for ourselves, trust and quality and standards. You have to pay your dues, though. You have to be patient, you can’t switch that on overnight. We’ve endured and stuck around through some pretty tough times, trying to figure this out. And here we are.”

Dickinson originally envisaged being a design company with other organisations building his ideas. “I didn’t expect this at all,” he says. “This is all a mistake. I knew something good would happen, I just didn't know where it was going to go. I thought we’d build maybe ten and then we’d go off and do something else. I thought we would be in a white office with screens and I’d have a bunch of creative people surrounding me and we would design cars.”

He knows how many more 911 ‘reimaginings’ there are going to be, so what comes after those? “There is a very exciting plan. I can’t really tell you much about it,” he says. “I think we have another three or four years of interesting stuff to build upon the idea of what we stand for, and then we’ll have the opportunity to pivot to do something maybe even more interesting. 

“What do we do with the company that’s learned what we’ve learned? That has relationships with people like Bosch, Mahle, Cosworth, Michelin and Brembo and all these fantastic people? That has relationships with incredible clients? What do you do with that company? Continue to modify other people’s cars? Maybe. Maybe you do something else...” 

Colour us intrigued.

Photography by Eimear Hyland, Jordan Butters, Raife Smith, Steven Stringer, Toby Whales and Tom Shaxson