ROB DICKINSON, 49, recalls the first time he saw a Porsche 911. His family was motoring up the highway toward Béziers, during their annual vacation in France's Languedoc region, when his father, something of a car buff, told Rob and his brother to look out the back window. "There's a car approaching," he said. "That's called a Porsche 911."

Five-year-old Rob leaped up on the back seat and gazed at the metallic green Targa screaming up the inside lane. "It made a huge impression on me," Dickinson says, "the sense that the 911 has two characters, this bright, smiley, happy fat front face and this angry rear end which goes hand in hand with the raspy sound of the thing."

That madeleine moment, an anthropomorphic first glimpse of the 911 as a living, breathing animal, triggered a lifetime spent adoring, owning and dreaming about the car. Every childhood birthday he asked his father, a French teacher, to take him to the nearest Porsche dealership in Colchester, England, so he could sit in the showroom cars. It is also the foundational moment of Singer Vehicle Design, a Sun Valley, California, company that produces what is officially called the Porsche 911 Reimagined by Singer, though that long-winded name barely begins to explain what Dickinson and his team actually create. If the great car designers of the 1960s had had access to today's ultralight carbon fibers and alloys and computerized fuel injection, braking and suspension systems, they might have built something like the Singer. It's essentially a hypermodern car wrapped in timeless, artisanal retro styling—today's version of yesterday's supercar of tomorrow. Or, as Car and Driver calls it, "The best early '70s Porsche 911 that never existed."

The legendary Porsche 911, introduced by the Stuttgart-based carmaker in 1963, is in many ways the archetypal sports car: long snout, slanted rear, two front seats with tiny spaces behind each, wickedly fun to drive and instantly recognizable, even if, according to Dickinson, the later models with their liquid-cooled engines have lost some essential, visceral Porscheness. Air-cooled Porsches, which include the original 911 (made from 1963 to 1989), the 964 Series ('89 to '93) and the 993 Series ('94 to '98), are considered by Dickinson (and many other purists) to be "real" Porsches. "Don't get me wrong; the new Porsches are great cars, wonderful, but they're touring cars," he says, and then he hurls what he intends as the ultimate insult: "They might as well be Jaguars."

Singer's modification of the Porsche 911 manages to be both a tribute to those classic models and a 175-mph rocket with finger-twitch-sensitive handling that can hold its own against the latest offerings from Ferrari (or Porsche, for that matter). Dickinson has created this supercar by being uniquely true to the Porsche heritage, building air-cooled Porsches more beautiful, more drivable and quicker than almost anything Porsche itself managed to do by taking advantage of a unique Porsche quirk—virtually every part from every Porsche 911 in the air-cooled era from 1963 to 1998 can be transplanted to any other air-cooled Porsche 911. This allows Dickinson to choose the best of breed for every nut, bolt and switch on the car, or else to manufacture better versions himself. "Let's take the best engine, shove it in the best chassis, put the best brakes on it, the best wheels, best, best, best," he says of his initial inspiration for Singer. "I have a very clear knowledge of when I know something feels right. There was never any doubt that if I was allowed to build the car I wanted to build, people would love it."