Ok, so you’ve probably heard the deal.

You buy an early 90’s 911 but are not quite sure it’s giving you the required style you thought you were buying into. It hasn’t got that hollowed out, race-bred leftism that your favourite, early seventies 911 classics came to the table with.

All you have to do is hand it over to Singer.

They will create something gobsmackingly, darn right beautiful like this. We’re not sure how much it’ll cost you (probably an arm and a leg) but god will it be worth it.

We stumbled across this set of pictures at one of our favourite online haunts A TIME TO GET but go to the SINGER SITE for the inside track on exactly what these guys do for a living.

It might not be original, but my word is it lovely. There’s me and my mind drive for the weekend sorted, then….

We’re always interested here in the definitive elements of what makes a car cool. Sometimes it’s that elusive little something — the angle of a raked pillar, the hunkered down detail of a rear end; the air of gracefl poinse with which a particular car corners — that makes us sit up and take note of a car and pick it from the throng of steel on our roads and tracks.

But sometimes, its just really cool stripes.

The latter is certainly the case when it comes to cars which have borne the blue, red and white livery of Martini Racing. More often than not it’s been a Porsche upon which this totemic colourway has been emblazoned. But there are Lancias and Alfas that have at some time or another raced with some sponsorship from the globally recognisable bland of Vermouth.

The branding recalls something essentially European, and the marketing has reflected that. You couldn’t imagine say, a Ford Escort Mexico rocking those colours.

The TV ads in the UK were great too, featuring notable comic performances from the likes of Leonard Rossiter and Joan Collins being extremely sophisticated and European.

If you’re a child of the seventies you may associate Martini with your mum’s drunken mates at parties, and you probably did the ‘all spirits in one glass’ cocktail thing laced with Bianco or Rosso on some pubescent New Year’s Eve.

But if you’ve got a soul sensitive to automotive aesthetics you will at the same time be reminded of Porsche 935s at Le Mans and the 037 Lancia scoring unimaginable air, coated in this ultimate paint jobs.

Not sure how it would look on my Volvo.

It was stumbling across this beautifully detailed cutaway this week (below) that inspired our current romance for Porsche’s first born.

Nay-sayers who claim that the original apple of Ferry’s eye is a Beetle with delusions of grandeur may have a point — but it’s the lovely attention to detail in the 356 that inspires us.

There’s something, too, about the spartan mechanicity of the car — conceived as it was at a time of extreme post-war austerity, that chimes with today’s times.

We believe we can detect a cheeky wink of a rebel heart clothed in the garb of a dutiful conformist in the 356 — particularly the clean, early examples. And that makes us smile.

The interior detailing is as reflective of everything good about Porsche as that of the overall fluid integrity of the exterior’s lines.

Click a couple of times on this illustration to see what we mean.

It’s no secret that we’re ambivalent about the 911. Until we drove a couple, we were a little sneery ourselves. You just see so many of the things that contempt is bound to arise through so much familiarity.

On the one hand, it is of course the ultimate, usable supercar. Most people stumbling upon this blog will have at one point or another fanstasised about being a 911 owner.

They are incredible cars and the formula has been honed to a fine edge at Stuttgart all the way from 1963. And aficionados insist that each Evolution of the rear engined wunderkind is simply better than the previous.

In their stripped down GT and RS guises the 911 is a pure race-bred monsters. The Turbos have retained their hooligan chic amid the bug eyed ubiquity and even bog-standard spec-levels of the contemporary Carrera can be tweaked easily to create a unique, reliable, usable daily drive of style, speed and panache.

On the other, of course, the Porsche 911 is an over-refined evolution of the Beetle format, the impulse buy of the bonus jockey and mainstay of high-earning yummie mummies in the Waitrose carpark.

It’s testament to the brilliant longevity of the idea that is the 911 that each part of this broad spectrum holds more than a grain of truth.

We when we stumbled upon this set of amateur snaps from a factory tour some time, we reckon, in the early seventies, you realise that there was a raw artisan element to Porsche’s of that early period that laid the foundations of the brand and facilitated all those technical evolutions.

Nostalgia again — for a time we barely knew. We’d like a 1972 RS Coupé. In orange with blue rims. Please.

Photos via Cinelli Guy

Top level motorsport is poorer without the involvement of works teams.

That’s why we were gutted when Honda, Toyota and BMW pulled out of F1.

And that’s why it sits uncomfortably with us that an F1 team with the name of an energy drinks company is running away with the title this year.

The wider automotive world needs companies that are making road cars involved in motoring’s cutting edge so that the trickle down effect of tech and aesthetic becomes bedded into mainstream car culture.

When they pull out the opposite happens. Look at Honda’s discontinuation of the sublime NSX and the super fun S2000. Look at Toyota’s blandified lineup. Look at BMW’s stultified development of new, exciting products these last few years.

So when we received word today that Porsche will be entering a fully developed works team at Le Mans in three years’ time, it made our hearts leap.

Surely the most successful team in the history of the 24 Hours needs to be there competing against the likes of Audi, Peugeot and Aston.

Not only does it put Porsche right at the heart of where they need to be, it throws down a gauntlet to your Ferraris and your Fords and any other global manufacturer who want to achieve true credibility.

Step up to the plate. Don’t just trade on memories and spurious ideas of ‘heritage’.

Bravo Porsche. May you make history anew.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click images and click top right to go huge!

With the great weekend at la Circuit La Sarthe almost upon us there’s little we’d love to do more than pull up the deep buttoned man– chair up close to the ‘tube, stack a case of fine claret and some fruits of the delicatessen, and gorge on the ultimate endurance event of motorsport.

Problem is, as with most forms of top-level racing, designs and sponsorship liveries have tended to meld into one colourful mass — and it has become more and more tricky to I-D your Astons from your Audis, your Porsches from your prancing horses. Especially at night. Especially eighteen hours into your marathon endurance armchair session.

So the kind folk from Nissan have offered these spotter’s guides to make life a little easier — and if you are like us nerdish about things graphic and car-shaped, we think you’ll agree that they look pretty beautiful in an aesthetic kind of way, even if you stripped away the use value.

Let’s raise a toast to the most famous single motor race on the planet!

In the history of Automotive brands there has been none with the length, breadth or depth of Porsche’s influence.

It’s amazing to think that it’s over a century ago that Ferdinand Porsche designed the world’s first petrol-electric hybrid — as well as the first 4 wheel drive racer.

Cars designed by the Porsche family business have been responsible for the best selling high-end production cars, the most winning racers and the most perennial performance icons to grace our roads.

It’s impossible in the confines of this ‘zine to define the importance of Porsche as a brand — but what follows is a tongue tip taster of their breadth of the Porsche appeal.

911 2.7 RS (1973)

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Ok, let’s get the obvious one out of the way. This is arguably the all time collectors classic 911 and built for FIA Group 4 homologation. If you are lucky enough to take a ride in one you will be stunned at the lightness and the tactile embrace of the stiffened suspension. I’d like mine in yellow please.

914/4 (1970)

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The first generation VW collaboration gets more appealing with age. Aimed squarely at the Californian market when it was released, it oozes a west coast style that is strangely inappropriate off Highway 1. Madly progressive for the time, you have to think of the Alfa Spider duetto and the Karmann Ghia for its antecedents. But that rear end is one of the greatest in the history of car design and eclipsed that of either of them.

917 (1970)

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Again, sort of obvious, the 917 in all of its manifestations is full of bombast, Wagnerian pomp — this 240 MPH racer was scarier than Colonel Kilgore and a Napalm-infused dawn. To think that it was actually homologated and some lunatics have driven them on the road is gobsmacking. The original Mulsanne muncher will never be surpassed.

356 B Carrera Abarth Coupé (1960)

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This aluminium bodied collaboration with Karlo Abarth managed to retain the signature line of the marque whilst adding something rakishly dynamic and different. It was brave of Herr Porsche to let go of some creative control — and Karl Abarth finally went ahead and commissioned ex-Bertone designer Franco Scaglione to build the original shells. Scaglione then apparently did a moonlight flit and offed with (some of) the money. A German-Italian collaboration that ended as badly as that of Il Duce and the Fuhrer. Both pairings left some handsome machinery that were great at their job.

Panamera Turbo (2009)

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Ok. We don’t care what Clarkson & Hammond think of this car’s looks. It remains an incredible creation. It is infused with all the values of Porsche’s long history of innovation. A friend of ours let us have a blast recently and it drives like a huge, hugely fast 911 that’s loaded up with too many Knoodle. And in our opinion, it is at least as good looking as Aston Martin’s Rapide (from certain angles). If you’re into executive wafters, you will waft more executively in this than anything else out there.

908/03 Spyder (1970)

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We fell in love with this thing after seeing it fly up the hill at Goodwood. It won the Targo Florio in 1970 and that graphic design is genius. Its average speed around Sicily was 140 KMH — and if you’ve ever seen the twisty roads of that beautiful island, you’ll know how incredible that is. It pushed 350 BHP and it only weighed 545KG fully loaded with fuel. That short wheelbase must have made it drive like a midget demon. Spectacular.

When talking about Porsche it may seem, at first glance, to be impossible to pick out a definitive model. There have been so many classically beautiful editions to have rolled out of the of the factory that to focus on any single model seems arbitrary and altogether subjective.

But there’s nothing wrong with a bit of subjectivity. In fact, the thing about classic cars – especially the truly great ones – is that any level of intimacy with them leaves an indelible mark on a person. Subjectivity breeds passion. And this is certainly true of my encounter with a Porsche 550 Spyder.

Image: Porsche AG

My all too brief moments with the little Porsche changed my perceptions of the driving experience for ever. It was all the more special, I think, because I was in my early twenties and at the time (the early eighties) I was aspiring to be a writer about cars. This was, remember the car in which James Dean, a hero of mine at the time, had met his messy demise. It was infused therefore with the sort of glamour shared by very few other models.

This was too, a fundamentally illicit encounter — which even further added to the feeling of fleeting, excruciating beauty. It took place over a couple of stolen laps of a Californian circuit (one that shall remain nameless) under the supervision of a wayward dealer who had recently brokered a lucrative deal on this particular car; the very car that had been a class winner at Le Mans.

I had met the dealer at a party in San Francisco the week before. The guy, introduced to me by a female friend, had mentioned in a drunken swagger about the ‘Little Bastard’ sitting in his garage.

We stayed in contact, and, flexing that typical American can-do attitude mixed with a splash of typical classicist bravado; he didn’t Welch on the deal to let me have a play before the car was crated and exported back to the new owner in Switzerland.

I had to hassle him a little to make it so, but what self respecting Porsche aficionado and wannabe motoring hack wouldn’t have done the same?

This, unfortunately, is all I can share about the details of the car– any more than I would have to kill you – or at least bombard each and every one of you with a Non Disclosure Agreement.

So for now we’ll stick to the main thing about these cars – the sublimely tactile, engaged experience they shored up on the lucky few who got to drive them. And I am one of those lucky few.

image: Shin Yoshikawa

What made the little Spyder so brilliantly successful is the unbelievably positive handling. The secret of its hilarious nimbleness can be traced more directly than anything else, to its clever suspension and the lightness of its frame. It had independent front suspension which was sprung on transverse torsion bars. At the rear, too, was a transverse torsion-bar setup with a swing-axle system controlled by trailing arms. Combine that with the welded-steel ladder frame chassis that weighed only 59kg and you have a piece of rolling stock with huge potential – and one at the cutting edge of mechanical tech for the period.

And then, of course there was the engine. It was for its time a complex little rear mounted lump with four cylinders arranged in a flat configuration. It was air cooled and had four camshafts arranged over the pistons. It was aspirated by Solex carburetors and developed around 110bhp – and this is the crux– the cranks turned happily and produced maximum output at over 7500 RPM. In the mid-fifties when this car was conceived, was an almost unimaginably high figure.

Image: Porsche AG

The fact that this very car was one of a small handful of Spyders pieced together with La Circuit De La Sarthe in mind might have added to the experience of slipping behind the wheel.

Through the mists of a trio of decades of time passed what remains locked deep into my memory banks is the way the car accelerated – and how its centre of gravity seemed impossibly low. The pick-up wasn’t progressive and smooth as in modern Porches (I have since owned several). Rather it was immediate and sparkling and induced very real and instant emotion.

The note produced by the exhausts was high pitched and insistent, the tone varying relatively little as you changed up and down through the box. The shifting was a relatively long throw if memory serves correctly but engaged with an incredibly positive feeling. I remember, too, how faithful the brakes were.

Image: Porsche AG

I had learned to drive in my father’s cars — constantly evolving collection that included a couple of Jags, numerous Coopers and Lotus racers and one or two Maserati from around the same period. I had been terrified by the lack of stopping power and the general heaviness of operation of most of these cars.

Therein, I think, is further evidence of the efficacy of lightness in the Spyder’s design. It was able to defeat much beefier opposition because of the combination of its high revving engine, its svelte chassis and lightweight body – which in turn enabled drivers to become intimate with the absolute limit.

Throw Porsche’s legendary reliability into the mix and its unsurprising that these cars were so successful.

But what truly remains of these two laps is the feeling that when engineering exactitude and racing passion met true beauty of experience could arise. In my opinion, the 550 Spyder may not have been infused with the absolute beauty of other Porsche racing cars (the 907 is my personal favourite from a visual point of view) but as far as experiential driving is concerned, I doubt I will ever drive anything nearly as emotion-inducing as this German sports car. It was an experience that came to define me on so many levels.

James Peter LeGrand let go of his aspirations of becoming a car writer – and is now a leading Media Lawyer, an enthusiastic but unskilled fly fisherman and a collector of classic sports cars.

The cult of the Porsche 911 is replete with subtle aesthetic shifts in its iconography. Enthusiasts worldwide pore continuously over the minutiae of designation numbers and cooling systems. Ducktails are tutted over; transmission types, Targa panels and sunroofs debated; colour, creed and class populate its geekery perhaps more than any other subdivision of the international nation of Porsche enthusiasts.

The reason for this is fairly clear — that the basic form of the Porsche 911 hasn’t changed since its launch in 1963 — but the range of cars available in this near half-century is almost too complex to document with any clarity.

Of course, one of the main reasons the 911 has retained its perennial appeal is that Porsche has never rested on its laurels. Right from the start, the search for a perfectly usable car that is as desirable and status-signifying as it is practical has led to an incredible variety of iconic types within the overarching brand of the Porsche 911.

One of the most intriguing manifestations of these time-shifts is the phenomenon of the ‘back-date.’ This is where an owner takes a modern 911 — perhaps one of the more accessible and affordable versions — and customises it in a retrogressive manner. In this way, the classic elements of 911s past can be woven seamlessly into the more recent evolutions — and a hybrid is formed, a kind of modern classic that can be tailored to a punters very specific requirements.

This sort of thing may make the purists wince — but surely if a motor car of true beauty is created as a result of this sort of backdate in homage to versions past — isn’t that something to be admired?

One of the high-points of this sort of reverse-customisation is this black beauty that is currently based in California.

It is based on a 1988 G50 Carrera sunroof coupé.

The original 3.6 motor is still there, but 993 brakes are added. Those Fuchs-style alloys are custom built and there is a fully upgraded track-calibrated suspension package. The transmission has been upgraded too with lightweight flywheels and all sorts of trickery. It has been repainted back to its original black– and there are there are fiberglass bumpers and bonnet whilst the original metal Carrera flares are retained.

The car’s interior has received a complimentary retro treatment but there is still the power windows, air conditioning, and heated seats. The look is complimented nicely by those sexy Tag Heuer Chronographs — and there are upgraded Xenon headlights and very modern but retro-styled harnesses keep the driver and passenger safe.

A quick Google around will show up a number of decent examples of late-eighties 911s for something in the region of £12-18K, and while you can expect to spend a pretty penny giving it the retro treatment to the standard of this car, it’s a prospect that really appeals to many of us who aspire to own a stone-cold classic original — but whose budgets may not fully meet the standards required.

There are a number of specialist workshops that will take on your project for you — notably PS Autoart — a company that has transformed many a workaday Stuttgart stomper into a bespoke dream ride.

Fuel for thought. In this eco-conscious age you can think of it as high-end recycling.