AUTO FOCUS
HIGH NOTE How Singer Vehicle Design reimagines Porsche 911s for gentleman racers... BY D U CAN Q U I N N
T
he late 1980s. Somewhere in the wilds of the English countryside, I get my hands on a tired Volkswagen Mk1 Golf. Not the sprightly GTI of legend. Rather a wheezing 1.3 GLS on bicycle tires. In keeping with its wine-coloured paint job, it drinks more oil than petrol, but still makes the 10.5km twisty country lane run to school in under six minutes. Complete with hedgerow scratches, tire squeals, fading brakes and shaking heads from other petrified road-users. The four-speed manual stick shift works overtime searching a gearbox that feels like a wooden spoon stirring drippy cake mix.
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Meanwhile the London City Boys wear red braces, pinstripe suits, flash watches, and speed by in bright red Porsche 911 Turbos. A piece of kit all wheeler-dealers aspired to. Not because they loved driving them. But because of the message they sent. Porsches would slowly go from being badly-engineered Volkswagen Beetle offshoots, to wide-boy 911 whale tail widowmakers, to docile Turbo S doctor’s chariots. Somehow a car that never should have shone became the shining example of Calvin Coolidge’s most memorable motto. Persistence won. And I am thankful it did. For without Ferdinand Porsche’s greatest creation having survived
