Another summer, another stanza in the composition of Singer Vehicle Designs’ Turbo Study. If you’ll remember, in 2022 Singer debuted the Turbo Study with a 964-derived (but heavily modified) 3.8-liter twin-turbo flat-six making either 450 or 510 horsepower and 442 pound-feet of torque, shifted through a six-speed manual gearbox. The original 964-series 911 Turbo, as all production Turbos before it, had come with a single snail, the 930 Turbo from the 1970s producing, at most, 325 horsepower from its boosted 3.3-liter flat-six. Later in 2022, Singer showed the Turbo Study in Cabriolet form with the option of rear-wheel or all-wheel drive. Last summer, the California builders wheeled out a new Dynamics & Lightweighting Study (DLS) in the shape of the turboed and whale-tailed racers from the 1970s and 1980s. And now, the UK’s Evo magazine enjoyed wheel time in a Turbo Study on the occasion of the original Turbo’s 50th anniversary, revealing two new body styles in the lineup: A Targa and the devilish Flatnose, also known as the 935.
The Targa is, naturally, beautiful. And while we enjoy driving one whenever handed the keys, we’re still not sure what compels buyers to stop at that middle step between coupe and convertible. Singer’s customers and their money keep the body style in the commission pool, a Classic Study Targa celebrated as the company’s 300th build in February of this year.
The Flatnose is another gorgeous icon that gives us pause, but only because we lived through the 1980s to see them in their natural habitat. In the U.S., perhaps no car said so clearly and simultaneously, “I’m a CEO who just left a meeting to close a leveraged buyout” and “I’m heading to/fleeing felony charges” more clearly than the car we called the Slantnose. These drivers were the perps that Sonny Crockett arrested in “Miami Vice,” while Crockett played the good guy in a Ferrari Testarossa. Wild times. And comical to think that all of this was born of a massively successful racing vehicle that often had to be mimicked in road-legal form by aftermarket companies like Designer Plastics Automobilbau and Strosek because Porsche didn’t sell the 930 Turbo here from 1980 to 1985.
Anyway, Singer’s is the most beautiful rendition we’ve seen outside of Porsche’s factory-created 935 “Moby Dick” redux from 2018. What the two have in common are enormous prices and limited availability. Porsche created its Exclusive department in 1986 because of demand for the car it called the Flachbau, hand-crafting fewer than 1,000 examples before shutting down the lines, followed by only 77 of the reborn 935/78. Over at Singer, buyers with at least $1 million for the build plus money for a donor car can put their names down for a Turbo Study in coupe, Cabriolet, and Targa forms, but Singer’s making just 25 of the Flatnose, and they’re gone.