Yahoo Autos Rob Dickinson, Founder of Singer, Talks about His Passion for Modifying Classic Porsches
C/D: How would you describe Singer?
RD: Singer is quintessentially a design company. That's how we thought of ourselves when we started. We turned into a restorer and a modifier, in terms of doing it ourselves, by accident. That was never our intention. My vision of Singer was always a room with a bunch of computers and sketch pads in it. And a bunch of creative people moving in the same direction. The Singer philosophy is a deeply held belief that there are entities outside of the OEMs that can reevaluate their work and present it in a fashion [the manufacturers] are unable to, whether that's from a regulatory point of view or a creative one.
C/D: Singer helped create a new industry; we'll call it "super restorations." Are there other companies in this niche you like?
RD: I divide the industry into two very definite halves. I see the opportunists, who see a business opportunity in doing something similar to, or indeed copying, us. You can imagine my view on that. Although I accept that it's part of the scenery of where we find ourselves. Then we have the people I feel have been inspired by us and have gone off and done their own thing in a way I wish I had done. The one that hits that out of the park is the Lancia [Delta] Integrale by the new AA company [Automobili Amos] in Italy, which I think is wonderful.
C/D: Would you do a 930-style car? Or a 935 race car?
RD: We've got a lot of ideas up our sleeve. I grew up with the G-series cars with the big bumpers in the '70s and the '80s. And in many ways, for our generation, that's the pinup 911. My love of every single model and iteration of the 911 is deep and profound. We will indeed be exploring other areas of Porsche's back catalog.
C/D: What about a water-cooled Porsche?
RD: As you can imagine, we have a number of opportunities. The 911 will be providing inspiration for many years to come. We started at the beginning with the early 911s, and I would hope that Singer has a lot of life left in it.
C/D: Do you build your cars with the idea that they'll be used every day?
RD: Of course. If there's a car on planet Earth that should be a practical, usable car, it's the Porsche 911. Any sense that we're building delicate garage queens or pieces of art that should just be looked at and appraised from a distance is crazy. It takes a drive in one of our cars to fully understand what we've been trying to do for 10 years. That's where the magic is.
C/D: Are you considering ways that consumers might access the Singer brand without having to buy an entire car?
RD: Absolutely. We're a company that can't afford its own products or services. So we live vicariously through the guys who can. Thank goodness they exist. How can we take those brand values and put them into something else as magnificent, as fantastic, as superlative and make it affordable is something we're still getting our heads around. We are two or three years into having our own Swiss-based watch company, and we've had some success launching a very progressive chronograph.
C/D: Do you find all this success surprising?
RD: I would sound like an ass if I said it didn't surprise me. But being deep in the trenches every day, and being consumed by this, you rarely look up over the parapet to see the context you've found yourself in. I don't want to do that. It scares the shit out of me. But it's affirming to that moment 10 years ago when I fully had no doubt that something good would happen from the work we did to finally get our idea out into the world. I spent a huge amount of my father-in-law's money to get to that point, because we couldn't find anybody else to invest in the company. But I've never had a sleepless night around that purely because I believed something good would happen.
C/D: Do you ever want to sit down and pluck away at your guitar and not think about Singer?
RD: No. I've got two guitars standing up in my house that I never touch. You're about to ask me what I would've done differently. To cut to the chase and that question, I would have gone around the engineering of the car in a way that would have made our work a little bit more straightforward to execute. As it is, the work we do on the car is extraordinarily time consuming, extraordinarily complicated, and that's fine. We knew that had to be. But we could have made decisions 10 years ago that simplified the process and indeed made the cars even better. Hindsight's a great thing, isn't it? We made so many mistakes. But without those mistakes, we wouldn't be what we are. That stumbling learning that we're still doing, it is part of the charm of the company.
From the February 2019 issue
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