There is a particular kind of car that makes you stop thinking about specifications and start thinking about time. Not lap times. Not 0-60 times. But the strange, collapsing distance between a 12-year-old boy watching Super 8 footage of a Porsche 934/5 tearing through the 1977 Watkins Glen 6 Hours and a man, decades later, building a company to honor what he saw.

That man is Rob Dickinson. The company is Singer Vehicle Design. And the car is the DLS Turbo.

The Ghost of the 934/5

To understand the DLS Turbo, you have to understand the car that haunts it.

In the mid-1970s, Porsche took the 911, already a legend on the road, and turned it into something fearsome for the track. The turbocharged 934 was built for Group 4 racing, but Porsche pushed further. The 934/5 was a variant stripped to its competitive essentials, with widened bodywork, massive air intakes, and a double-planed rear wing that looked more like industrial sculpture than aerodynamic hardware. In 1977, the 934/5 dominated the SCCA Trans-American series, winning six of eight races and claiming the championship outright.

It was aggressive, unrefined, and impossibly fast. It was also the moment the Porsche 911 revealed its other life as a full-blooded endurance racing machine.

This is the car Singer’s founder has spent most of his life thinking about.

“As the familiar face of a Porsche 911 morphed into impossibly boxed hips, gaping intakes, and a giant double-planed rear wing, I can still remember the shock,” Dickinson recalls. “Since Singer began, I’ve wanted to return to that moment, collaborate with our clients and celebrate that car.”

Singer: The Restorer That Became the Standard

Singer Vehicle Design was founded in Los Angeles in 2009 with a simple but ambitious philosophy: take the air-cooled Porsche 911 (specifically the Type 964, produced between 1989 and 1994) and reimagine it for the modern era without losing the soul that made it iconic.

The company’s Classic services established the template. Every restoration starts with a customer’s own 964, which is stripped down to its bare steel monocoque, assessed, cleaned, and rebuilt from scratch. Carbon fiber bodywork, bespoke interiors, and meticulously developed flat-six engines transform the car into something that looks period-correct at a glance but reveals staggering depth of engineering on closer inspection.

Then came the DLS, or Dynamics and Lightweighting Study, which partnered with Williams Advanced Engineering (of Formula 1 fame) to create what Singer called “the most advanced air-cooled 911 in the world.” A naturally aspirated 4.0-liter flat-six, four-valve heads, and a relentless focus on reducing mass made the DLS a benchmark for what the restomod world could achieve.

The Classic Turbo services followed in 2022, exploring the turbocharged heritage of the 911 through the lens of luxury grand touring.

And then, in June 2023, Singer answered the question its founder had been carrying since childhood.

DLS Turbo: The Numbers Behind the Obsession

The DLS Turbo is, at its core, a turbocharged evolution of the DLS program. But “evolution” undersells it. Nearly everything has been redesigned.

The engine starts with the Type 964’s original block, which is disassembled down to its core and rebuilt. The result is a 3.8-liter flat-six with four valves per cylinder, twin turbochargers with variable turbine geometry, water-cooled cylinder heads, and air-cooled cylinders. An electrically powered horizontal fan (driven by its own motor rather than a belt, so it doesn’t steal power from the engine) provides additional cooling.

The output: 710 horsepower and 750 Nm of torque, with the engine willing to scream past 9,000 rpm.

All of that power goes to the rear wheels alone through a six-speed manual gearbox. No paddle shifters. No dual-clutch automation. A manual transmission, an open gate gear lever, and your left foot deciding when to change.

For context, the naturally aspirated DLS produced around 500 horsepower. The DLS Turbo delivers 210 more, plus a massive increase in torque (from 430 Nm to 750 Nm), and channels it through the same basic rear-engine, rear-drive architecture that made old turbo Porsches both legendary and terrifying.

Engineering That Hides in Plain Sight

The original Type 964 chassis had a torsional rigidity of about 7,000 Nm per degree. The DLS increased that to 15,000 Nm through additional bracing and reinforcement. The DLS Turbo pushes it to roughly 25,000 Nm per degree, a figure that rivals modern supercars.

This was necessary. With 553 lb-ft of torque and barrel-like 345-width rear tires, the chassis needed to be fundamentally stronger. New damper top mounts, a lattice brace at the front, a roll cage integrated into the cabin pillars, and extensive welding and structural reinforcement were added. None of it is visible from outside the car.

The suspension features double wishbones at the front and reworked trailing arms at the rear. Braking comes from Brembo’s top-tier carbon ceramic discs. Bosch developed the stability control, traction control, and ABS systems specifically for the car, all condensed into a simple rotary mode dial behind the gear lever.

The bodywork is entirely carbon fiber, shaped through computational fluid dynamics analysis. Central front intakes, hood vents, rear fender intakes, and NACA ducts manage cooling for the engine, brakes, and turbochargers. Side-exit exhausts, running through a hybrid Inconel and titanium system, give the DLS Turbo a sound that is deep, guttural, and unmistakably Porsche.

Two Cars in One

One of the DLS Turbo’s most distinctive features is its switchable identity. Owners can choose between two configurations.

The track-focused setup features the “Loop” rear wing, a towering, adjustable structure directly inspired by the 934/5’s double-planed wing, paired with a deep front splitter and aggressive front fascia. The road-focused configuration replaces these with a more restrained ducktail spoiler and a lower-drag front end.

About 75 percent of the 99 owners being produced have opted for both sets of body panels, which arrive in custom flight cases along with an alternate set of wheels. Switching between the two takes roughly two hours and transforms the car’s visual character entirely.

What It Costs, and What That Means

Singer does not publish a base price. Every DLS Turbo is built to order, personalized in collaboration with the owner down to graduated paint finishes, hand-stitched interior leather, Alcantara accents, and floating instrument gauges built to watchmaking standards. The average spend on a DLS Turbo sits at approximately $2.9 million.

The first completed car, named “Sorcerer” by its owner, was delivered in January 2026. It wears a graduated Fantasia Blue finish that darkens toward the rear, with Pebble Grey leather, Pearl Grey Alcantara seat centers, and Champagne-finished magnesium center-lock wheels. Every DLS Turbo is built at Singer’s facility in the United Kingdom.

Why It Matters

The restomod world is crowded. Dozens of companies now offer restored and upgraded classics, from vintage Mustangs to Land Rovers. What separates Singer, and particularly the DLS Turbo, is the depth of intent behind the project.

This is not a car that exists because someone identified a market opportunity. It exists because a boy saw a 934/5 on film in 1977 and spent the next four decades building toward the capability to honor it properly. The engineering is not tacked on to justify a price tag. It flows from a design philosophy that treats Porsche’s racing heritage as something worth protecting, reinterpreting, and pushing forward.

Top Gear, reviewing the car in March 2026, gave it a perfect 10 and described the experience of driving it as “trembling with excitement.” The reviewer noted that Singer had targeted the Ferrari F40 as a benchmark for the kind of explosive, turbocharged intensity they wanted to achieve, and concluded that the DLS Turbo delivers on that ambition while adding modern safety nets like Bosch stability control and carbon ceramic brakes.

The DLS Turbo weighs 1,450 kg with fluids. Its weight distribution is 38/62 front to rear. It is geared for 218 mph and has been verified beyond 200 mph. Singer makes no official claims about acceleration times or top speed. They simply do not care about those numbers. The car exists to deliver a feeling, not a data point.

The Verdict

The Singer DLS Turbo is not a restomod in the way most people understand the word. It is a philosophical argument, built in carbon fiber and Inconel, about what the Porsche 911 was always capable of becoming. It is the 934/5’s spirit, distilled through decades of engineering progress and one man’s refusal to forget what he saw as a child.

Only 99 will exist. Each one is different. All of them trace their lineage back to a single moment at Watkins Glen in 1977, when a Porsche 911 with boxed hips and a giant wing proved that the most famous sports car silhouette in the world had another life entirely.

The Singer DLS Turbo is that other life, fully realized.