Singer DLS Sells Quickly

I’ll admit, this one caught me by surprise. Just a few days after noticing this gorgeous Singer DLS at Graham Rahal Performance, I returned to see a SOLD status. While every Singer is custom-built (which can be a turn-off in the used market for those clients who want their own “stamp” of individualization), it certainly didn’t hinder this car’s sale.

DLS Background

Singer Vehicle Design’s Dynamics & Lightweighting Study (DLS) is the moment the company stopped merely perfecting the air-cooled 911 and started reimagining its physics. Conceived with Williams Advanced Engineering, the DLS was prompted by a single client’s challenge—pursue the most advanced air-cooled 911 possible—and quickly became a clean-sheet study in how far a 964-era 911 could be taken without losing its soul. Hagerty summed up the brief via founder Rob Dickinson: despite the racing know-how, the four-liter is “a proper road engine,” built to be lived with, not just admired.

Upgraded Throughout

Compared with Singer’s “Classic” restorations, the DLS differs everywhere you look. The carbon-fiber bodywork, the WAE-developed aero (born after an early “catastrophic” wind-tunnel session), and a wholesale rethink of mass distribution mark a step change. MotorTrend reported efforts to trim weight and improve balance—including moving the engine forward and using extensive carbon and aluminum—while Wired detailed how aero revisions like a subtle roof channel turned turbulence into downforce. Only 75 will be built.

4.0 Mill

At its heart sits a 4.0-liter, air-cooled flat-six with four-valve heads that revs to around 9300 rpm and makes roughly 500 hp—numbers that place the DLS in rare air for any naturally aspirated road car, let alone an air-cooled 911. Top Gear lists 500 bhp and a claimed 1050 kg, underscoring the DLS’s ruthless power-to-weight focus.

Rave Reviews

Road & Track captured the quantum leap best: the DLS “takes the original Singer concept…to a level never imagined before,” marrying Singer’s “everything is important” mantra to Formula 1-grade engineering.

Top Gear’s first drive reached for superlatives, calling it “calmly astonishing” and a car that will “magnify, intensify and endlessly enrich whatever driving you’re doing.”

In short, where standard Singers are artful restorations, the DLS is a research program on wheels—a limited, wildly expensive, rigorously engineered proof that the classic 911’s essence can survive, even thrive, under the harshest modern scrutiny.

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