Singer Vehicle Design has been restoring Porsche 911s for about a decade, and during that time the company has typically stuck to optimizing early-gen 911s for road use, with tuned engines, lighter body panels and modernized interiors. For its latest endeavor, though, Singer is doing something truly ambitious — and the result looks phenomenal.
This is Singer’s All-Terrain Competition Study, or ACS for short. Built in collaboration with Richard Tuthill, a guy who knows a thing or two about modifying 911s for rallying, the ACS started life as a 1990 964-gen 911 before Singer took it under the knife and transformed it into the ultimate Safari tribute.
The suspension has been entirely reworked for as much travel as possible, complete with twin five-way adjustable dampers behind 16-inch aluminum wheels set inside monstrous BFGoodrich tires. The ACS is all-wheel drive, all the time, and has been fitted with an FIA-compliant roll cage, seats and harnesses, ensuring the car doesn’t merely look rally-ready, but is fully cleared to defend its honor, too.
The improvements don’t stop there. The 3.6-liter flat-six has been twin-turbocharged to produce 450 horsepower, though Singer points out that the “performance characteristics of the engine can be tuned depending on the demands of competition and the owner” — further proof that this thing is intended to race, not just be ogled.
You’d be forgiven for thinking the ACS is a non-working design prototype at first glance, though, because it looks that good. Ok, the tires may be a little extreme for purists, and the size of those canard mud-flap things on the front are comical. Still, the treatments are so tasteful that Singer easily could’ve fooled me into thinking this project was officially sanctioned by Porsche as some kind of spiritual successor to the 959's Safari getup.
I’m in love with the ducktail wing, the mesh-covered taillamps and the juxtaposition of the gunmetal bumper floating above the carbon-fiber diffuser and skid plate. And, of course, that’s not the only place you’ll find carbon fiber on the ACS either, as every one of the 964's body panels was replaced with a lighter counterpart.
As it happens, the client Singer originally built the ACS for actually requested two: a white one for desert rallying, and a red one for tarmac events. The red one exists only in renderings at the moment, but it looks every bit as much of a stunner. Singer shared no words on pricing but seeing as how its ordinary 911s extend well over half a million dollars, it’s looking like the ACS might be a little more costly. Just a hunch.
