I’ve driven a ‘re-imagined by Singer Vehicle Design’ 911 before, a naturally-aspirated Classic restoration that redefined my understanding of what an ‘old’ car can feel like, mostly because everything that matters – and with Singer everything is important; it’s been the mantra since day one – had been lovingly restored or upgraded. Though the Classic services look older and curvier than their Type 964 source material, they drive like something more modern (they’re far faster, grippier and well-braked than even a period RS, for example) while retaining the dinky size and timeless silhouette that makes pre-996 911s so special.

But the Classic order book is now closed, and, while much has stayed the same, at least in terms of the mission statement, Singer has gone supernova in recent years, shedding its boutique hot-rod shop vibe for a vast and modern new facility (complete with its own spray booths – not easy in air quality-obsessed California – and home to 450 employees), pushing the limits of what might reasonably be called a restoration with its outrageous DLS and DLS Turbo services, establishing an engineering facility in the UK’s F1 belt (with another 200 employees) and pulling together a dazzling collection of top-tier collaborators, including Williams, Brembo, Bosch and Red Bull Advanced Technologies. It’s also introduced this, the ’70s 930 Turbo-inspired Classic Turbo – one of which we’re driving today – as its main restoration offering. You turn up with a donor car and your life savings – Singer will do the rest.

‘They [the Classic and new Classic Turbo] share almost nothing beyond the 964 engine and monocoque,’ confirms Fawaz. In part, this is Singer flexing its engineering ambition and capitalising on lessons it learned during the DLS projects. But the Classic Turbo service is also about making restoration timelines more consistent, reducing tolerances and boosting rigidity within what remains a labour-intensive process.

It’s working. The lag between ordering and delivery is coming down as annual output rises, from less than a car a month in the old days to 27 restorations in 2021 to 140 in 2023 (Singer’s intended output for the foreseeable) – and this together with a paradigm shift in technical ambition. ‘The level of complexity is a different order of magnitude, not least modern traction control and stability control,’ explains Fawaz. ‘With Classic it was just ABS; it didn’t really need any more than that. But with the Classic Turbo that’s changed, and the systems required to support that meant we had to make a giant step forward.’

Fast forward a couple of hours and – heart fluttering, mouth parched – I pull off the road, kill the engine and climb from the 911’s cosy cockpit with as much grace as my quivering limbs can manage. The quiet that follows is almost as beautiful as the flat-six racket that’s soundtracked my last hour. A gentle ocean breeze hisses through the dry, scrubby undergrowth. Hot components cool with a frantic ticking. And hundreds of feet below the hypnotic Pacific pounds the Californian shoreline with a muffled roar like a distant storm.

Too often complacency steals the really special moments before you get a chance to notice they’re in your hands. Not this time. I am under no illusions. These hours – in this car, on this road – will be with me until the big sleep comes (and possibly even after that, who’s to say?). And as I take a moment, the fact that this 911 and I find ourselves together feels like a miracle of good fortune on my part.

Talk to Singer Vehicle Design founder Rob Dickinson about origin stories and he smiles at the butterfly effect of one song: Black Metallic. Over seven minutes long and big on mood shifts, it didn’t look, smell or sound like a hit single when Dickinson wrote it, sitting on his bed at his parents’ house, or when his band’s label released it, in November 1991.

But fate had other ideas. Out in the world, the tune was adopted by LA juggernaut KROQ. The station loved it, cut a radio edit and played it on heavy rotation. California found itself falling in love with Dickinson’s band, Catherine Wheel. And Dickinson, who’d studied car design and worked as a car designer before going all-out to make music work, found himself falling in love with California. Coincidentally, I studied the same course, and briefly met Rob when Catherine Wheel did a record signing in Coventry. Later, he’d move to LA to pursue a solo career. Less exotically, I moved to Peterborough to pursue my dream of a job in journalism.

Again, fate had other ideas. Inspired by hot-rod culture, California’s Porsche obsession and a mental scrapbook of lightweight 911s, Dickinson built his dream car. It became, in his own (only half-joking) words, the coolest car in the city. And the demand it unearthed (he could have sold it scores of times over) gave him the push he needed to establish Singer Vehicle Design. So now here he is, living in California, creating exquisite Porsche restorations. And here I am, accepting invitations to leave Peterborough (a wrench…) and drive special 911s like this one, a smile on my face and Black Metallic in my Spotify downloads.

Heading north on the Pacific Coast Highway earlier, the Classic Turbo restoration and I began to get to know each other. I worked to master its meaty clutch, re-adjusted to floor-hinged pedals and even reached gingerly across the bonnet to top up the tank (the central screw-off filler cap, labelled ‘Fuel’, is a tactile joy). And immediately it became clear this was no softly-softly GT; not in this specification at least. For while the Classic Turbo remit was always meant to include touring (plenty are being ordered with comfy seats and cruise control, and the nose lift is fast), just as Porsche’s original 3.0-litre and 3.3-litre 930 Turbos bundled refinement and distance ability in with their boosted straight-line speed, every Singer restoration is a sandbox. Its makers may have lavished thousands of hours on reduced NVH, flawless midrange flexibility and Bosch electronics to spare you a whoopsie, but if you want your Classic Turbo restoration hard-edged and track-ready, that’s cool too – this ‘Fuji’ commission is proof of that.

Finished in Turbo Racing White, it’s firmly suspended, runs green tartan bucket seats together with very little carpet and, though it has seatbelts, harnesses dangle from a half-cage. So yes, you could tour in it. But you could also find a road worthy of the car and drive it like it wronged you in a previous life. A road like Deer Creek, perhaps.

Climbing from the ethereally spray-wreathed highway, Deer Creek is steep, sinuous in the extreme and sensational. A ruthless cross-examiner of a car’s dynamics, not least its ability to change direction quickly but without instability and to stop hard without burning its brakes, it’s also mostly deserted, its chunky cambers, wicked curves and gut-churning drops enough to discourage anyone looking for an easy life.

First impressions are all good. The seats are perfect; all-day comfortable but so supportive you’re never distracted by having to hang onto the steering wheel mid-corner. Given the grip available (tyres are 18-inch 245/35 Michelin Pilot Sports on the front, 295/30 at the back), that’s no mean feat. And because this is a 964 it’s everything a 992.2 can’t be, so light (circa 1280kg, depending on spec), compact on the road, big on glass rather than pillars and alive with feel through the hydraulically-assisted rack. (Singer rebuilds the system with faster gearing, lending the car a giddying agility. Wider front tyres bring additional heft, too.)

Tyres, brakes, engine oil, cabin… everything’s warm now, so I click the air-con up a notch and quit the short-shifting. The alacrity with which the 911 punches out of corners should be startling. Like falling out of a plane, speed builds immediately and rapidly. And yet there’s nothing startling about it, so smooth is the power delivery and so honest and open your dialogue with the car. The gearshift, like a good espresso, is short, sweet and powerful in its effect on your heart. Created by Ricardo for Singer, it’s a bespoke six-speeder (the 993-derived ’box Singer uses in its Classic restorations couldn’t handle the Classic Turbo’s torque). You always get the shift you wanted, quickly and with such matter-of-factness you wonder why we ever thought to leave manuals behind. (Singer’s dabbled with PDK ’boxes in CAD; too big, thankfully.)

With the first hairpin comes a reminder to adjust the stability control. It defaults to a very conservative setting, such that as the 911 and I arc into the corkscrewing second-gear left-hander and then go to explore the rear Michelins’ limits on exit, wheelspin is massaged away so discreetly it just feels like the twin-turbo six has dozed off momentarily. It’s an impressive display of delicacy, but I want to feel the full force of this money-no-object motor, a 3.8-litre evolution of the ‘Mezger’ flat-six with twin variable-vane turbochargers borrowed from the 992, complete with electronic wastegates and air-to-water intercoolers. Outputs start at 450bhp, though this example’s dialled up to a little over 500bhp.

Playing with the stability control setting, Sport (dubbed ‘lap times for dummies’ by Fawaz) and Track (‘expert play time; it’ll try to save you if you’ve really fumbled things but it’s not guaranteed’) offer more scope to let the car move. And move this thing does. From the hairpin, Deer Creek climbs at a ferocious rate, weaving with every ridge and fold in the mountainside as it makes for the sky.

Acceleration is delivered in a single thick seam, and the sensation is entirely unlike that of a similarly quick modern car. Where so often the sense is of huge power moving a lot of weight, here it’s of a healthy glut of grunt meeting with very little resistance, like a sailing dinghy in storm-force winds. The result is more satisfying somehow, and purer. And then there’s the noise. Relatively unobtrusive at a cruise, the twin-turbo six’s soundtrack – via a titanium sports exhaust – is hard-edged and multi-layered now, every shift in load, throttle position and revs bringing out more of its meaty musicality.

Earlier on, this example of the Classic Turbo service adhered to Fawaz’s description of the project’s character: ‘We wanted something that gave you a tremendous amount of confidence; locked down, like you’re driving a piece of granite,’ he told me.’ If you want to drive something that scares you, we’ve got that. But here we wanted the car to feel like you could hammer it as hard as possible and it’d never get out of line.’

Sure enough, the car’s doing nothing to undermine my growing suspicion it might be some kind of Michelin-shod cheat code, so faithfully does it respond to my every input and so unstressed does it feel running the kind of corner speeds that reel in normal traffic like it’s stalled.

Then, just as I’m worried this new turbocharged era might be a little more mono-dimensional and less exciting somehow than Singer’s first age, amazing things start to happen. I’m pushing harder, the electronics are leaving me to it and the tactility this new/old 911 begins to demonstrate is on a level I’m not sure I’ve experienced before, its mix of monumental mechanical grip and high-definition adjustability confusing at first. I tend to think of the two things as mutually exclusive, but Singer’s inspired blueprinting of 40-year-old 911 dynamics begs to differ.

The grip on offer means you can drive quickly and neatly until the sun’s dipped beneath the horizon and the surfers are towelling the sand from their toes, guiding that low nose with direct, almost kart-like steering. And yet every lift, modulation of the brake pedal and squeeze back on the throttle has a pronounced effect on the car’s balance, trajectory and attitude, the unique 911-ness – trailing-arm rear suspension; rear-engined weight distribution – the ghost in the machine that keeps it from becoming in any way inert. That old 911 interactivity is still there; filtered, massaged and made more predictable than it ever was in period.

The only rough edge in this hypnotically cohesive driving experience is the first degree or two of brake pedal movement, in which not much happens. Such is the power and feel at your disposal thereafter that the impotence in that first millimetre or two of travel can be distracting, occasionally derailing your flow until your muscle memory gets a fix on exactly where the pads begin to work the discs in earnest.

Explains Fawaz: ‘Where you’re happy to have the carbon ceramics [steel brakes are an option too] is on a circuit, where the stopping power is off the chart. This car was one of the first, and some of the calibration and systems are still early versions. We’ve since made changes to the clevis and the brake booster geometry to optimise the feel at the pedal.’

California has a way of calling time too soon, the sun dropping into the sea fast and early. It’s getting dark as the Fuji car and I work our way back to LA, the indigo sky backlit and luminous. And out there – omnipresent and brooding in the half-light – is the Pacific, a vast and shimmering expanse of black metallic. car