This Restored 89 Porsche 911 Could be Yours
Dan Neil dips his toe in the world of hyper-restored cars from Singer Vehicle Design and finds the ‘Hollywood Commission’ of the Porsche 911 a drastic improvement in almost every way
5 min
OUR TEST CAR cannot be bought for love or money. This 1991 Porsche 911 reimagined by Singer Vehicle Design—called the “Hollywood Commission,” in Bahama Yellow—is one of only 450 examples that the Torrance, Calif.-based fantasy factory will build, all of which are spoken for, with average costs in the high six figures, not including the donor car. Which is a pity. I was this close.
Some might ask why even bother driving Mr. Hollywood here, since Singer’s “Classic Study” cars are basically unobtainable. People ask silly questions, don’t they? For Porsche fanatics, such a car lives at the end of an impossible, aspirational rainbow, right next to their pot of FU gold. Imagine, a fully modern, daily driveable vintage 911, with a flat-six engine rapping and wailing at over 7,000 revs, meshed with the perfect five-speed (or six) stick shifter—a car with all the charisma of the classic design but twice the performance, rebuilt to standards of precision that make those schlubs back in Stuttgart look like cave dwellers.
Singer is building an even more bat-guano crazy, nth-degree restomod: the Dynamics and Lightweighting Study. Developed with F1 technology house WAE, the DLS gets the full Singer treatment, including a motorsports-tuned rebuild of the naturally aspirated flat-six engine. Prices start just shy of $2 million. Only 75 will be built. At last count, more than 50 commissions had been completed.
Founded in 2009 by musician Rob Dickinson, Singer started humbly, and relatably, as one guy getting in way over his head restoring an old car. But he had game. “Pretty soon, people were asking Rob to do another, and another,” said Mazen Fawaz, Singer’s chief executive. This was fortuitous inasmuch as Dickinson had once trained as an industrial designer.
Dickinson is by no means the first to slam and tune a 911, but it’s fair to say no one has ever gone quite so far, at such a high level of precision, with such impeccable taste and with so little regard for propriety.
It only takes a couple blocks in the “Hollywood Commission” to tell that it’s a drastically better car than the donor ever could be. For one thing, it borrows from its technical near future, using the steering rack and brake package of the 993-chassis GT3, with ABS and rotors the size of Saxon shield bosses. The motorsports-evolved front end is one reason the test car corners with the smartness of a modern track car instead of gently obsolescing junk.
In back, under the engine cover—watch that you don’t klonk yourself on the big spoiler—you will find a beautiful ceramic-finish plenum, also nicked from the 996-series GT3, wrapped in braided stainless steel. When they see it, dudes make a face like pirates opening a treasure chest.
Before my visit, I winced at the word “reimagined,” but it kind of works as a last option. You can’t call what Singer does restoration because so much of the donor gets binned, starting with the steel fenders, which get swapped out for luridly flared, flawlessly finished carbon-fiber hips. In our car, the doors and monocoque frame remained in the original German steel.
It’s not re-manufacturing, either, since what’s left is not returned to original. Every widget has been breathed upon, updated or mutated for motorsports.
Nor might you call it tuned. What Singer does is more invasive than that. While the suspension layout (upper wishbone and lower A arms in front, and trailing arm in the rear) is faithful in principle, the geometry is radically different. The front and rear track are much broader, wheels are wider, the ride height lower, the stance vastly slinkier.
The componentry is state-of-tomorrow hot-rodding, including fully adjustable Öhlins suspensions, heavy-duty bushings, forged aluminum links and bars and heim-joint adjustable cross-strut brace up front. Note: All of this can be ordered, a la carte or prix fixe, according to the client’s wishes, la-tee-dah.
The traditional 40%/60% front/rear weight balance remains intact, but the handling is unrecognizable. Oversteer, schmoversteer. Hunkered over fat Michelins, the car’s grip on the street is unshakeable.
Glory be, listen to that engine. Typically, the donor’s flat-six gets bored and stroked to 4.0 litres displacement, around 390 hp. It then gets a motorsports makeover from top to bottom, with lightened valvetrain, titanium conrods and forged pistons, forged crankshaft, lightweight flywheel—the proverbial works, if your proverbs include bratty Shanghai billionaires.
At full song, over 5,000 rpm or so, the free-breathing six snarls and snare drums, on and off throttle, with a titanium-piped resonance that is thrilling, tromboning, outrageous. In the driver’s footwell: three small pedals, perfectly positioned for heel-and-toe footwork.
In contast to all the high-tech hot-rodding, the 964’s steel frame needs little to no additional bracing, I was told. Singer will seam-weld a car’s monocoque if asked, but it’s considered unnecessary. For one thing, the car emerging from the process weighs 150-200kg less than it did going in.
Which brings us to my takeaway: Among all the wonders of Singer’s fabrication, the haute-couture upholsteries and the horological obsession with precision, the most astonishing bit of kit remains the 911’s monocoque structure, a design that dates back almost unchanged to Ferry Porsche’s original in 1963. Of all the liberties taken it’s practically the only thing that remains sacrosanct.
Hallelujah.
1991 Porsche 911 reimagined by Singer ‘Hollywood Commission’
Price: $1.5 million
Powertrain: Naturally aspirated 4.0-litre DOHC flat-six engine; six-speed manual gearbox; rear-drive with mechanically limited-slip rear differential
Power/torque: 390 hp at 7,200 rpm/432 Nm at 5,900 rpm
Curb weight: 1,242 pounds
0-100 km/h: 3.3 seconds
Corrections & Amplifications
The price of the Porsche 911 reimagined by Singer ‘Hollywood Commission’ test car is $1 million, including the cost of the donor car, and its front/rear weight balance is 40%/60%. A previous version of this article mistakenly referred to the $1 million figure as the “base price” and stated that the front/rear weight balance is 60%/40%. (Corrected on June 9.) The Dynamics and Lightweighting Study model of the Porsche 911 reimagined by Singer includes a naturally aspirated engine. A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that it has a turbocharged engine. (Corrected on June 12.)
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Mirzaian is a senior director within CBRE’s Development NSW business, operating across the company’s Western Sydney and North Sydney offices
Singapore’s Formula 1 weekend has always looked different. Held beneath floodlights on the Marina Bay Street Circuit, the race transforms the city into a nocturnal spectacle of speed, heat and saturated colour. It is this distinctive atmosphere — and one of Singapore’s most important natural symbols — that has shaped IWC Schaffhausen’s latest motorsport-inspired watch. …
Continue reading “IWC’s purple Formula 1 chronograph pays tribute to Singapore after dark”
Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, “Lords of Serendipity,” delivers a biting satire of cheating, politics and dysfunction across modern universities.
5 min
Administrative cowardice. Rampant cheating. The soaking and scamming of undergrads and grad students. Performative wokeism. Intensifying competition for international tuition dollars from an expansive China.
These are either the latest dire headlines about American higher ed or the myriad subplots of “Lords of Serendipity,” an ambitious new novel by Randy Boyagoda. Unlike most campus fiction, its scope extends well beyond the cloister of the liberal arts classroom to whammy the entire university system, from its financial model to its function within a globalized economy. Along the way, it skewers its lightning-rod targets with a precision too sharp to be considered entirely fictional.
That its author is not only well-versed in satire, having written four other novels in the genre, but is also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an experienced college administrator, further blurs the lines between comic fiction and brutal fact. It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing.
“This is someone who’s got the inside dope on what can go on at universities, especially with international students, and what kind of con games are going on,” said Margaret Atwood, a friend and fellow Torontonian.
The novel, like Boyagoda himself, is often very funny—even as the dilemmas its characters face read as tragedy. Its cast includes the bickering members of a Sri Lankan hotel cleaner’s family, insecure American freshmen, dead-end third-tier college professors and their highflying Ivy League counterparts and dispirited university functionaries. An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses, from a classic liberal-arts college to a stand-in for Harvard University to an urban technical school to the dilapidated buildings of a state-run university in Sri Lanka.
“I’m a joyful person,” Boyagoda said in an interview, though he prefers to see his outlook on academia as “hopeful” rather than optimistic. He smiles and laughs frequently. He bikes everywhere. He derives energy from his students and from his four daughters, ages 14 to 20. They help him and his American wife, Anna, also an educator, care for Boyagoda’s father, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who has dementia and lives with the family.
The germ of the novel came to Boyagoda during the pandemic, when he was serving as a vice-dean. An urban legend was circulating about a statistics grad student selling passing grades to international students. The cheating scheme itself may well have been apocryphal, but it felt tantalizingly plausible.
“As a novelist, it stayed with me,” Boyagoda said. “Who would sell grades for a stats course? Why would someone buy grades? What’s motivating them? Why wouldn’t the university be doing something about it?” What he didn’t want to do, he explained, was write “another novel about a creative writing professor and his drama with students.”
In addition to writing novels—the first of which was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize; he’s written eight books in total—Boyagoda teaches literature full-time. For his students next semester, kids raised in a purportedly “post-literature era,” he’s assigning three 700-page novels, he noted mischievously, books by George Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Kiran Desai.
On RateMyProfessors, students remark on Boyagoda’s heavy assignments, tough grading and distaste for cellphones, but also hail his “comedy.” When alerted to these reviews, Boyagoda laughed. “Guilty as charged,” he said.
“Randy’s one of those people in academia who is very well educated but doesn’t have an ounce of superiority about him,” said John Irving, who frequently guest lectures in Boyagoda’s classroom. “It’s amazing to see how willing students are to talk in his classrooms, how little afraid they feel of being mocked or put down—he gets complete candor out of them.”
Negotiating competing interests seems to come naturally to him. Like many college campuses, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the University of Toronto was embroiled in protests, encampments and discord; part of the school’s response was to convene a working group on civil discourse. Boyagoda was put in charge, serving for two years. It’s the kind of thankless task many professors would flee from, but Boyagoda relished the prospect and thinks the group, which is ongoing, made progress.
He has since pivoted to another formidable academic concern: the waning prestige of the humanities. In July, Boyagoda became the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science. This fall, he is starting a series of gatherings he calls the Dead Book Club. (Dead writers feature heavily among his favorites: St. Augustine, Dante, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow.)
“The goal is to encourage students to read for its own sake and have conversation for its own sake,” Boyagoda said. “The importance of the humanities will be revealed to those who participate.”
“Lords of Serendipity,” which publishes next week, reflects Boyagoda’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge: “I’m supposed to say I learn more from my students than they do from me, but no,” Boyagoda said. “I enjoy sharing my excitement and joy about literature and ideas. There are these moments when you are teaching and you can see someone’s face change because they didn’t know something and then they did. That moment when you’re actually watch someone enlarge themselves is deeply satisfying.”
In literary circles, Boyagoda is often referred to as a Catholic novelist, a description he embraces. “A novelist willing to give shape and voice to contemporary religious experience is needed,” Boyagoda said. “I understand myself as a Catholic novelist, provided that I’m not only a Catholic novelist, I’m also a South Asian novelist and I’m a Canadian novelist. I don’t want to be captive to one label.”
His characters, he said, are subjected to what he calls “Graham Greene character situations.”
“They are trying to do good in a fallen world and realize the most they can do is less harm than someone else would do in that same role,” he explained. “They have to accept they are complicit in something that provides some good thing to others. It’s a very Graham Greene way of thinking about sacrifice.”
The campus green they inhabit is a febrile zone in which lofty ideals and cynicism regularly collide. It’s a place where a traditional holiday college celebration is now an occasion for political protest. Kids freely police one another inside and out of the classroom with social media their constant, ready weapon of choice. International students, knowing their family’s financial futures hinge on their degrees, operate in terror of failure and deportation.
Early readers of the book include Gary Shteyngart and Junot Diaz, both of whom have taught at universities and written comic novels. They each contacted Boyagoda midway through to say, in essence, “You nailed it.”
As biting as “Lords of Serendipity” can be, Boyagoda’s faith in higher education remains undaunted.
“It’s absurd that we live in societies that make the decision to take people between the ages of 18 and 22, when they are most physically capable of contributing to our nations and communities, and tell them, ‘Go away for four years, and read and learn and have conversations,’” he said. “I want students to be aware of what an incredible privilege that is.”
Corrections & Amplifications
Randy Boyagoda is a special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science at the University of Toronto. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a special adviser to the dean of humanities. (Corrected on Sept. 2)
From the shacks of yesterday to the sculptural sanctuaries of today, Australia’s coastal architecture has matured into a global benchmark for design.
BMW has unveiled the Neue Klasse in Munich, marking its biggest investment to date and a new era of electrification, digitalisation and sustainable design.
